We all have our passions, our quirky things that make us happy.
For me, among many other things, it’s used books, travel books, explorers and adventurers memoirs, books about the Orient, and the Arabian Nights.
So you can imagine how happy I am: this morning the postman delivered a package containing a very cheap, terribly battered but perfectly readable hardback copy of Tim Severin’s The Sinbad Voyage.
A single book that checks all the categories mentioned above, in a single package. Continue reading
Category Archives: Armchair adventuring
The birthday of the ragman’s son: Kirk Douglas at 100
Today is the 100th birthday of actor Kirk Douglas.
With over 90 acting credits on IMDB, Douglas is one of my favorite actors of all time, and one whose films are part of my personal history. The guy’s been Spartacus, he’s been Van Gogh, he’s been Ulysses, Doc Holliday and Ned Land.
So, not knowing how to celebrate the birthday of this icon, I decided to do a post about the five Kirk Douglas movies I like the most.
Nothing fancy – just a trailer and a paragraph with some personal notes.
Enjoy! Continue reading
Grim London: the dark history of a city
Crimes? Murders? Capital Executions? Hauntings? Monsters?
All this and much more has been carefully mapped and documented by the creators of Grim London, and interactive map that will inform you and delight you for hours, and an excellent resource for writers and urban explorers.
Check it out!
Roleplaying is good
Tits & Sand (& Pixels): Prince of Persia 2
I was asked about Prince of Persia 2 a few hours back, just as I was looking for some images to illustrate this post.
I’m not a fan of nostalgia gaming, but indeed there were some interesting gamesd in the past1, and maybe something interesting can be extracted from those memories.
The complete title was Prince of Persia2: The Shadow and the Flame, and it came out in 1993. It worked with both DOS and Windows.
By that time I had a color PC display, and the new game looked like a million dollars on my Zenith . And indeed, superficially, it looked just like that – more eye candy, a refurbished look for a game that was basically the same.
The gist of the game: evil vizier Jaffar, that we thought defeated at the end of the original game, is back. He steals the Princes’ identity, puts a death spell on the Princess, and sits on the throne. But once again the Prince escaped his captors, and he’s on a quest for the tools that will help him defeat the bad guy. Continue reading
Tits & Sand (& Pixels): Prince of Persia
The 1980s. Videogames.
The Adventures of Robin Hood, Erroll Flynn and Basil Rathbone.
Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Rotoscoping and Max Fleischer.
The Arabian Nights.
Fantasy writing and three writers laughing and reminiscing.
This post had to happen.
A few days back I mentioned Prince of Persia, cited as a direct influence by a young fantasy writer, who replayed it as documentation for a novel.
That post led to a chat with two friends of mine: Mauro Longo, game designer and writer, and Samuel Marolla, writer, publisher and screenwriter. We laughed a lot, wondering if the young novelist re-played our Prince of Persia.
The one that ran on a single floppy disc, and in which you could save only after the third level.
We all had our special memories of the game – the almost hypnotic state in which repeating the sequence of commands would drop us. The sword duels. The traps.
We laughed a lot, and we remembered the fun we had back then.
Later other friends joined the discussion, pointing out how sophisticated and elegant the game was for its times, how mind-bogglingly beautiful it looked in that time of 8-bit graphics.
But at that point, of course, I had already reinstalled it on my PC, and had a go at it after twenty-five years. Continue reading
Karavansara 