Archives filed under "sheffield"

Happy New Year!

I rather enjoyed my rest—including my extended rest from blogging—and got rather a lot done. A new year sparks new resolutions, however, and one of mine is to start blogging again. To start the new year, let’s go backwards in time!

The BFI has a wonderful, 113-year-old film travelling some of the old tramlines of Sheffield. Every now and then, I experienced a flash of recognition of streets I’ve gone down hundreds of times in this, my adopted city, here looking rather different.

An eerie familiarity

It gets cold in Sheffield & I occasionally need a balaclava. I need this balaclava:

Good for going to the shops, too

Regretsy (sadly defunct) had the following fantastic comment on it:

Before you dismiss these as being totally impractical, consider how fun it would be to put one on and go wash your car in the driveway. Or if you live in an apartment, you could just keep one by the door for when that kid comes by to sell you a subscription to People.

Because apparently they’ll fuck you up.

One of the perks of downtime—perhaps the perk—is that you have time to play games. I’m a casual and very infrequent gamer: before this past week, I’ve literally spent about 30 minutes playing games in the past two years total. I’m therefore about as skilled playing “Call of Duty 4” as you might imagine.

And yet: how thrilling that Valve & Steam was coming to the Mac; and even more so to hear that Half Life 2 was coming with it! Your average PC user might think my enthusiasm retro (really? I’m super thrilled to play a six year old game?), but I just never played it. I’d only seen screenshots. It looked good.

I’m not into this for the blood & gore. Much like Nicholson Baker in “Painkiller Deathstreak”, his article about gaming in this week’s New Yorker, I’m struck by the beauty the artists have imagined for their worlds. Even when the setting is a depressed industrial town, in ruins after the alien invasion, it can take my breath away.

But the following moments looked… familiar:

This could be the block of flats across from the Arts Tower

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Looks a bit like the Park Hill Flats over the Train Station

Wait! How did the Ponderosa get flooded?

I just wish people would stop shooting at me so I could enjoy the scenery.