Today is one of those depressing humid and overcast days that makes you want to curl up in a corner and take a nap.

Rather than taking a nap, I did what I sometimes do on such days - I surfed aimlessly on the net. Somehow I ended up here and began reminiscing about the old Sierra games I used to play in my mis-spent youth (and still do occasionally). They don't make 'em like they used to, that's for sure!

These days it's all 3D first-person shooters and the like, and adventure games like the old Sierra ones have fallen by the wayside. Don't get me wrong, I still like a lot of new games (I'm looking forward to Doom 3 and Half-Life 2, and I had a blast working my way through the XBox version of Return to Castle Wolfenstein and other games) but it seems like the old-style adventure game hasn't grown into the new technology so well.

Oh, I know there are adventure games made these days, but none of them seem to have quite the same spirit as the early ones. One group of people, calling themselves the Anonymous Game Developers Interactive (formerly Tierra Entertainment), feel the same way. They've been working on remakes of the old Sierra games and are doing an excellent job!

So far they've completed versions of King's Quest 1 and 2 with full-speech and digital music, and they're busy working on an update of the classic, Quest for Glory II. I'm looking forward to this one!

Meanwhile if I'm still feeling nostalgic, I can always load up one of those old games in my collection. Which reminds me -- I still haven't figured out how to get my intrepid explorer down the steep incline in Goldrush without the oxen bolting and smashing him and the wagon to bits!

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We picked up some Mexican takeaway last night (we had to - it was Cinco de Mayo, you know!), but we were quite annoyed and underwhelmed by the whole experience. The place was a madhouse, with a poorly designed and tiny parking lot. It had only recently been built, yet already one of the prominently displayed items on the menu didn't exist, as we were informed when we finally reached the counter.

While Carrie waited in line, I drove around for 15-20 minutes trying to find a parking space (I eventually nabbed one when someone else pulled out).

After another 10 minutes or so, we finally got out of there and drove home. The food was cold and remarkably bland - we've made better burritos in our own kitchen. I guess we shouldn't have expected much from a fast-food place (which was actually pretty slow). It wasn't Taco Bell, either ;)

We should've gone to El Roboso instead. That's a fine (and authentic) Mexican restaurant in Rockford, IL. They make everything by hand, the service is great, and the food is among the best Mexican we've ever tasted. We go there fairly often, but decided not to yesterday only because we wanted to try this other place and we figured the restaurant would've been busy. Oh well!

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In other news, we watched Flatliners on tape last night. I found the ending a bit hard to swallow, but other than that, it was fairly entertaining. I also watched a couple of episodes of the Twilight Zone a few nights ago, including the cliched, Probe 7 - Over and Out. I guess the series wasn't in its prime when that episode was made!

Last week on a weekday we watched Secondhand Lions on DVD (starring the slightly more grown-up Haley Joel Osment of The Sixth Sense fame). That was a good movie, except the ending was a bit schmaltzy! Still, it was a better ending than the original one they'd chosen...

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Yesterday volumes 1,2 and 7 of the Sturgeon collection arrived. I'm looking forward to getting stuck into those eventually, but meanwhile I'm trying to get through the Michael Marshall Smith collection, More Tomorrow and Other Stories. I've been nibbling away at that since February, but I'm hoping I can finish it in the next week or so.

On the writing front, I've written a critique for the crit group and I'm still yet to write my weekly story. Ideas are brewing for some of the short stories, but as usual I'll probably end up cranking out a flash piece at the last minute!

I received an encouraging email today from an SF mag, saying that one of my stories has passed the first round of reading. It's still too early to get my hopes up, but I've got my fingers crossed anyway :)

What I'm Reading:
More Tomorrow and Other Stories by Michael Marshall Smith
Science Fiction 101 by Robert Silverberg
Analog Science Fiction, September 2003
Green Grow the Rushes-Oh, by Jay Lake (this one's a chapbook)
Greetings from Lake Wu by Jay Lake