A Bug's Life

I set off to walk to the pub. After five minutes, it started to rain. After ten minutes, I was soaked right through to my socks and able to walk through 3" puddles without noticing any difference in my foot dampness. I thought "If I get to the pub (another 30 minutes) I won't enjoy sitting round in such wet clothes." Then I thought "If I went home I could play Portal." Which I can! Thanks to the kindness of the Friendslist in troubleshooting, of damerell in providing a spare graphics card, and of major_clanger in fitting it, checking it, updating drivers, checking it again and finding it crashes with the new drivers, and reverting to an earlier version.

It is fun! You can point and click, and go through a thing and come out of another thing, and the computer voice has a great line in causing inadvertent terror :-) I've not played a game with fwd/back/l/r + mouse to rotate before, and it's taking a while to get the hang of it (but am up to L10 already). This is why I resist first person shooters, I'm afraid I'll meet the enemy and be too busy accidentally stumbling sideways into walls to shoot them (also, shooting things is Wrong). "Hey, alien guys, mind waiting till I've figured out how to face you before you shoot me? Left, back, left - oops, dropped my gun..."

In another learning/manouevring context, my driving instructor sent me down a dual carriageway and I drove at 70mph and changed lanes without killing anyone :-)