Toomanywires

Nothing makes less sense than the Call of Duty launcher I tried to navigate last night. I wanted to play the Modern Warfare 3 campaign, the latest Call of Duty that had been added to Game Pass that morning. Expecting a sizeable file, and being that I'm very smart, I got the download underway around dinner time, so that it'd be ready for an evening session. Or so I thought. Fast forward to 11 p.m., and I'm freshly showered and in my jimjams. I grabbed my Starfield Xbox controller - an 8/10 game but a 10/10 peripheral - turned on the Xbox and sunk into the sofa. The Call of Duty app was awaiting me on the dashboard but, surprise surprise, it was only partially downloaded. Fortunately, enough progress had been made to be able to launch the game. It's time for murder, I thought. But there would be no killing. The game loaded - so far so good. A mini-intro to Call of Duty played, providing brief glimpses of characters past and present. Some of them I recognised - Price, the

A friend told me to keep an eye out for beaver-like creatures that roam the banks of the Kamo River. I need little encouragement to seek out unfamiliar animals. I saw a large snake on one of my evening runs just last week, and was thoroughly delighted; my tanuki encounters earlier in the year will likely remain 2024 highlights. Anyway, as you might expect, I was well up for spotting this mystery river-dweller. It was on the second night of drinks on the banks of the Kamogawa, a river which runs through central Kyoto, that I spotted one darting through the grass. Unbothered by the hundreds of revellers, many of whom were in town to attend annual indie game show BitSummit, it came within a metre or two of our group. It must've been 2 a.m., and we were several drinks deep, so at first I wasn't sure whether I was seeing quite what I thought I was seeing. So I got closer and, sure enough, it was a big rat-looking, beaver-ish creature. I pointed it out to the group, but they weren

I've been busy studying for the N2 Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) over the last month, and haven't had time for words about games. Fortunately, that's over now, or at least it is until December, when I expect I'll be resitting it!  But that's ages away. So, words about games: 1. Chants of Senaar and the Dream of Fluency It was fitting that I played Chants of Sennar, a game about an incomprehensible, fictional language becoming comprehensible, as I studied for my Japanese exam. It's about language acquisition through context, experience and a dollop of guess work. It's far from realistic, of course, as it mightily speeds up the process of learning a language. Think Tom Cruise picking up nuanced grammatical structures just by listening to the locals for a few weeks in The Last Samurai, as opposed to me still struggling with Japanese fluency after countless years living here and fits & starts of committed study.  While it may fast track the proce