There's A Hole In The Sky...

Well, the conference in Edinburgh was OK I guess, but I got the overall impression that the four invited speakers were just having some kind of conversation between themselves at times. There is no way that their talks could be realistically understood by people like myself who are new to the subject. Given that it was given the title of being a "workshop" it's a little disappointing that such a high level of prior knowledge was assumed.

Ah well, at least I got to spend some time with my friend, had my first taste of Indian cuisine and saw the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. I watched The Illusionist (which was better than I thought it would be), wrote a little of my novel on the way up and played a few games of Scrabble.

And I also played Portal for the first time. I was talking to my friend's housemate and I mentioned to him that I had wanted to play that for a bit, and he said, "Well, I'll go fire the computer up then."

Half an hour later I had a big silly smile on my face, and that night I had bizarre dreams of jumping around on platforms suspended over a partially deserted/abandoned city, chasing people who were in front of me and who never turned around. (slightly sinister was the feeling that I didn't want them to turn and face me, as if there was something "wrong" about them)

I'll leave you with the trailer for Portal, and hopefully, even if you're not that into games, you will appreciate why it is such an exciting game conceptually.

Normal service will resume tomorrow. Now I have to go home and mark about forty homeworks and then plot out the second half of my NaNoWriMo novel...