Cinematography

Here he is at last: Sten the bard! I realised that Sten was mentioned a few times on my website but I hadn't actually put up a portrait of him. Also, my best drawing of Sten was in biro from last year (or perhaps the year before) and didn't scan very well so yesterday afternoon I composed the below drawing and coloured it ready for upload. His left forearm is a little warped and his head is rather large but otherwise I like the way it came out.

I'm a fan of old legends and mythology, and I thought Beowulf was pretty good. I hadn't seen any trailers for it so I didn't know about the whole computer generated imagery aspect of it; the special effects really merged with the rest of the film very well. It might not be this year's Lord of the Rings but it was still very watch-able, I'll probably see it again when it comes out on DVD. If you liked Troy or 300 then you'll like Beowulf. Also, apparently there was already a Beowulf film called Beowulf and Grendel. I wonder what that adaptation was like?

On the subject of films I've had Man on the Moon suggested to me by a friend, while my brother Sam is still insisting that I should watch Jerry Maguire. I'm still trying to get around to watching A River Runs Through It all the way to the end, so far I've seen about half an hour of it before something has come up to take me away from the rest of the film.

Sam's ferret, Whisper, was ill over the weekend so Sam had to spend all his time and money on him. Whisper seems all right now, his physical symptoms have cleared up, but he's not eating as much as we'd like. Hopefully his condition will improve further. I think Sam has parted with a total of £90 this weekend in vet bills... and the vet still can't tell him what's wrong with Whisper. Money well spent huh?

I've been playing Thief: The Dark Project this weekend. Despite its ancient graphics, the game is still highly playable. I'm surprised at how easy it was to pick up and play. Rope arrows... rope arrows! I might actually get around to completing it this time around; last time I played Thief I played it up to the last level before the computer had to be formatted (this was on an OLD Pentium 166Mhz processor that could barely take Thief's graphics). Then, when I played Thief 2 on a newer computer (1.4Ghz AMD Duron processor), I managed to get to the very last level before, guess what, my PC had to be gutted and formatted when the motherboard blew. So despite being a big, big fan of the Thief games, I've only ever completed Deadly Shadows. Speaking of stealth games, I'm borrowing Splinter Cell: Double Agent from Sam for the XBox 360; so far it has proved to be very good, but I despised the Russian tanker level and I'm not sure if it's possible for mortals to attain a 100% stealth rating on most levels.

And I finally managed to retrieve Althea's Ashes in Guild Wars! My part consisted of me (ranger/mesmer though I never use my mesmer abilities), one warrior/monk player, and two NPC henchmen (the healer and the mage). In the end my warrior buddy timed out and I was left with two low-level NPCs against an army of Charr. Thanks to the command heroes or henchmen buttons that are now available (they didn't exist last time I played Guild Wars) I was able to set and spring plenty of horrible traps for the Charr and lure them away from the ashes for long enough to grab them... then I slew the lot of them. Now I look back I wonder what was holding me back when I had a whole party of players behind me. I suppose players are less inclined to act as bait than NPCs are.