Dave's Comics

Dropped by Dave's in Brighton to see if there had been any sales of the comic... 3 copies still waiting there in the minis & indies box!

Minecraft is eating my life

I have a couple of expensive games waiting to be played, including Halo: Reach, and a backlog of books to read.  But what's taking up most of my free time is the open-world in-development indie game, Minecraft.

It's a graphically simple, randomly generated world (with a cool procedural algorithm that creates some amazing landscapes), in which you mine for resources, and build your way around the place using what you dig up.

You make a home for yourself - which, of course, you find you must customise and beautify - and with a workbench and a furnace, you can make tools, food and other goodies, using a simple grid pattern to create recipes for new objects.

There's a day-night cycle; in the day, simple farm animals hop about but all is relatively peaceful.  But at night - or if you dig down deep, in the dark - zombies and skeletons and giant spiders appear, which you must hide from, or fight with whatever tools you've made.

It is narrative-free: which means that the best stories come from it.  Search for videos on YouTube to see what I mean.  It drops you in the world, and lets you discover; it gives you the tools to shape the world, and simple incentives to explore it.  You soon personalise your world; you invest yourself in it, and you enact the story of your struggle to survive in it.

It will be big.  Really big.  It's being updated all the time, and it's hitting critical mass around now...

Because I Am update

I'm starting to see the first few sales trickle in for the minicomic. Hope the punters will enjoy the book enough to leave a positive review and rating on the site when they receive their copy. :)

On the subject of reviews, there are two copies presently in some state of manufacture or travel on their way to graphic novel/minicomics review sites, so I hope to see reviews emerging within a couple of weeks. Look for an update.

Because I Am

So, my new 'minicomic' is done and printed, 5 years after 'Flotsam and Jetsam'.

It's a bigger and better-presented sort of affair, and you can buy it online - Print-on-demand - from lulu.com.

It's also available at a couple of independent booksellers in Brighton: Dave's Comics and City Books.

Look to your right for previews and links to buy.

Migration

It's overdue time to reorganise Crosbie's Ready Room and Crosbie's Blog Cabin.

The old host is really messy with popups and popovers, and the static website is looking very very old-fashioned.

I'm going to gradually work on getting the Blog Cabin back up to speed, and aim to add a static page eventually for info about my comics.

The crosbies.co.uk domain will redirect here, though I'll leave the legacy pages - if nothing else, they store some of the images from the archived blog posts.

Don't hold your breath, but watch this space, if anywhere...

...And back again

Shortly after Lycos announced they were closing and deleting everything - prompting me to shift hosts to 110mb.com - they got bought out and put everything back after all. Huzzah!

It's taken me this long to fix the settings on the Blabin and redirect crosbies.co.uk via Namesco - they were hassling me to renew the lease on the domain, so that reminded me to try and put everything right. Which is not easy.

Whilst we're at it

I'm surprised there isn't a handy iPhone app or webapp for Blogger.
Is its day past? Still, looks like I can email posts from my iPod... this doesn't mean I'll actually return to posting regularly, of course.

Moves and Closures and Breaks, oh my!

The Blog Cabin has moved, along with the Ready Room, to a new host, 110mb.com. This has inevitably buggered all sorts of things up so everything looks ugly.

I may reconsider the whole site located at crosbies.co.uk, but for now I'm just trying to preserve the stuff people might be looking for - ie, any remaining NWN players. :)

It might make sense to make the Blog Cabin the main page, in fact. There might be a chance it might get updated - though my internet presence is essentially Facebook at the mo.

Dan Corbett is WeatherMan!

"That's the weather, for now" is Kirsty's regular blog sharing with the world the joy of Daniel Corbett, weatherman extraordinaire on BBC News 24.
He couples gloriously enthusiastic presenting style with off-the-wall metaphors and accompanying gesture worthy of Marcel Marceau. He is, in short, a gem of British TV.

The 17th Century 'Cosmopolitan'

Loath as I am to link to The Daily Mail, this is nonetheless a rather interesting historical text on the social mores of the late 17th century: The 17th century women's guide to looking good.

The treatment is typically crass, but as an exercise in contrasting styles, perhaps that has its own value...