If I had a Delorean, I would…

… stock up on Glenfiddich, rifles and acid, drive back to Cuba in 1961 and do it RIGHT this time.

… introduce Charles Babbage to Nikolai Tesla and have them invent the internet 100 years early, thus establishing a steampunk paradise.

… drop in to 2150 and give those Daleks a swift punch up the bracket.

… tell L Ron to base his quack religion on GOOD sci-fi, and not a rejected Flash Gordon script.

… pick up Bertie Wooster and Reginald Jeeves for a Blues Brothers-esque jaunt across 1930′s UK.

… let Jesus, Gendun Drupi, Muhammad, Confucius, Guru Nanak & Siddhārtha Gautama duke it out once and for all and watch the sacred bloodmatch whilst toking up with Lord Omar Khayyam and Malaclypse The Younger.

… duel with Hitler on top of a zeppelin in a thunderstorm over the Houses of Parliament. With harmonicas.

… go back to the early 90s and provide the music industry with a cure for James Blunt.

… give Bill Clinton the address of a decent dry cleaners, and jam out to some Jerry Rafferty with him in the Oval Office.

… pick up Carl Sagan and take him back to the Royal Library of Alexandria.

… show a 90′s Jay Leno a recent monologue from The Tonight Show.

… tell Tim Child to drop Virtually Impossible and shoot that 9th season of Knightmare.

… tell Lincoln that Our American Cousin was getting shit reviews and take him out to some Gilbert and Sullivan instead.

… hide under the Mona Lisa and erotically tickle her feet.

… show Martin Luther King Jr the BET network.

… nip forward 15 minutes, copy this post, come back to now and paste it into WordPress, thus saving me a tiresome trek through the maelstrom of idiotic ramblings that is my Twitter archive.

A Cautionary Tale

(A short piece of whimsy from longtime collaborator, Alastair “Flibble” Payne.)

*

“Hey, you can’t park that here!”

I loosened my grip on the reigns and stared down at the narwhal that sat calmly between my legs.

“Why not?”

The stout man in the red uniform’s voice issued forth, seemingly, from the bristling moustache that gyrated provocatively beneath his inflamed nose. His irate discourse imparted, after a fashion, that I was in violation of various local traffic laws and customs to which all road users were honour-bound. He indicated a nearby street sign which he felt corroborated his claims.  I looked at him, at the indecipherable tablet, then back at the little leather reigns that sat sadly in my hands.

“Not on a Sunday,” the portly man finally summarised, “not on a Sunday afternoon outside a church.”

I looked at the iron railings to my left; they did indeed seem to encompass a spired, red brick building that, with some deliberation, I agreed I recognised as a church. Dejected, I sat back on my narwhal. He undulated pleasantly under my weight.  The sign bolted to the cast-iron railings identified the street and indeed the imposing church, though I accepted the latter only grudgingly, were to be found somewhere in Ealing. The ground was thick with damp, red and orange leaves which heaped against the railings and the trunks of nearby trees; I could hear the gentle rustling of the narwhal’s belly nestling in the autumnal detritus even over the comforting purring he emitted.  A deteriorating flier on the pavement advertised the existence of the Ealing East Concessionary Society, though the melted pulp did not betray their noble intentions.

The rotund officer fished a yellow pad from his pocket, then an HB pencil, the tip of which he licked demurely before scrawling something on the pad. Tearing the topmost page from his pad, he gingerly approached my steed and began to ferret amongst the bushy straw eyebrows he found there, seemingly seeking a window wiper under which to affix his ticket. The narwhal bridled gently but did not object to the incursion.

“Excuse me,” I ventured after a time. “But what are you doing?”

He told me that which I had expected. I was happy to let him continue. As his frustration with his intractable task grew, I could hear his disgruntled mumblings grow in volume from an angry murmur to an audible string of expletives. I heard him raise the question on multiple occasions as to whether I had a tax disk and that I was liable to be clamped and fined if he found me lacking. I did not ask how he hoped to reconcile clamping me with my parking indiscretion with his intention to detain me further. I did not ask him. Instead, I slowly rolled the narwhal out from under his probing grasp and gently began drifting away from the unpleasant incident beside the church in Ealing.

A typical day on Twitter

Reality on the Norm – The Underworld

Up and coming crime lord Frank Malone thinks he’s struck it big when Michael Gower, recently elected mayor of Reality-on-the-Norm, hires him as his bodyguard – after all, what could go wrong with a job where you are effectivly paid to do nothing? But things take a nasty turn when his brother Fred turns up out of the blue with one thing on his mind: revenge. Suddenly, Frank has to actually get out from behind his desk and do something if he wants to keep his demented sibling from turning the Mayor into something resembling a fresh meat counter.

Meet dodgy geezers with nefarious intent and dubious personal habits.

Notes

This is my first completed foray into the Reality on the Norm project, finished back in July 2008. I had just started dabbling in AGS, and wanted to cut my teeth on a simple project to get the hang of coding a basic game, whilst giving the new backgrounds that were being created at this time some in-game exposure. The original Underworld, created by AGSer Kunafits, seemed the ideal choice for the remake treatment – nearly all of the backgrounds and sprites it featured had since been given newer, considerably shinier versions, and the original game was compiled with a version of AGS that didn’t work very well on newer operating systems.

As the project went on, I took the opportunity to slightly tweak certain parts of the dialogue, add extra room descriptions and generally flesh the narrative out a little more. At the end of it though, it’s still Kunafit’s game, and I hope I was able to do his original work justice. It was a nice little project to work on, and a good exercise in learning the basics of AGS.

Download

The Underworld (690kb)

The Painter

(Originally written for the 2008 Mysterium yearbook, this Uru short story is set following the events of the episode “Scars”. Special thanks to Charlene Hamilton for her part in bringing this new mystery of the Restoration of D’ni to light.)

*

There has to be an easier way to collect these blasted things, thought Julian bitterly. One that doesn’t involve my untimely death would be nice.

The young academic sighed and wiped the perspiration from his brow. The refreshing breeze wafting along the Takotah Plaza was doing little to stifle the nervous anticipation he felt, perched on the edge of a crumbling pathway the sight of which would give most health and safety inspectors a triple coronary. He idly wondered what had happened to the cones that supposedly denoted this walkway as unsafe. Then again, it was likely that anyone needing warnings about the inherent dangers presented by a two thousand foot drop would be no great loss to the gene pool.

Of course, that didn’t change the fact he himself was kneeling on the edge of a structurally unsafe crevice with his arm stretched out, looking like he was undergoing the world’s most avant-garde attempt at suicide. Grimacing, he strained his arm until he could almost hear his tendons screaming in protest.

Just a bit further…

Let me tell you a tale…

He was a Master of Masters and a blessing upon mankind. And then some.

He had walked the earth as Hunter S Thompson, Lord Denning, the Marquis de Sade, Randolph Carter and Che Guavara. Probably not in that order, though.

He could speak 17 languages, juggle cantaloupes with his toes, conjure forth live budgerigars with a wave of his fingers and whistle the entire works of Ludwig Van Beethoven without breaking a sweat or collapsing from shear boredom.

He had fought in wars, swam every ocean in the world, hopped across entire continents with his feet in handcuffs and once spent forty days and forty nights in the middle of the Sahara desert in yellow fishing waders and a metal trilby just to win a bet with David Cameron.

He has escaped a bottomless pit using nothing but a length of dental floss and a hypnotised hamster, tamed a griffin with the power of suggestion, become a Twentieth Dan Master of the ancient art of Po Keeni at the humble age of 13 and single handedly ended the Cold war with his unmatched powers of blackmail (his accomplishments were thusly stolen by Reagan, who took much of the credit).

He held the ears of Monarchs and Maharajahs, Fuhrers and Fatcats, Pharohs and Princes. From the mighty rich to the humble poor, no one was unworthy of his time or favour.

He sold his soul for rock’n'roll, made love to a thousand godesses, earned and blew at least seven fortunes, travelled to worlds beyond our universe and stared into the staring, unblinking eye of the Creator Of Us All. And, acting on behalf of all who dwell within his domain, gave it a damn good poke.

His name is Andrew ‘DC’ Marshall, also known as the Deviant Gentleman. Scholar, dreamer and seeker of that which is known as ‘ultimate truth’.

I’d trust anything he says about as far as I could throw the Isle of Wight, myself.

But that’s just me.