A tape this morning first thing. I really wasn’t in the mood. Acting doesn’t switch on until noon. Had to do it though.
Thank fuck for ground coffee. I bubbled an espresso, shat like a horse, and put on a winged collar and a frock coat.
I’ve got a good tripod now, and the morning light is great in my flat. They were drilling outside but thankfully it isn’t a tender scene. It was a monologue and then a few lines of character swapping. I learnt the first paragraph of the monologue to lull them into a false sense of security. Then the rest was semi learnt semi read. It’s ok, they said in the instructions that we could read it. Still, I like to do as much as I can but I’m old and gnarly enough to have received dozens of “thank Al for all his hard work but…” I didn’t take a day down to learn it. I lived my life instead. In the end I either look like they want or I don’t. I can be fucking Laurence Day Burbage and if I’m too tall or brown or whatever they’ll go with Tommy Wiseau instead. I think it was a great tape anyway. As I said to Lou, there’s a lesson in that. I still dressed appropriately, got up early, tried. But I didn’t beat myself up.
A few hours enjoying the wonderful weather and then off to meet a girl about a panda. Artist collaboration brewing again. Madness will ensue.
Now I’m home, staring down an early bed. Invigilating tomorrow. Got some lines to learn for Monday. Keeping myself honest.
I’m playing Telltale’s The Walking Dead game series, and it is an absolute masterclass of cinematic game design. I haven’t watched the TV series or read the comics but my understanding is that it is a parallel story with a few intersections, but with the freedom for the narrative to be influenced by the players choices. It’s beautiful and terrifying and menacing and human. Like “The Last of Us,” a zombie narrative where the people are worse than the zombies. It’s a done thing, but this was made in 2012, and has been untouched in my steam library since it was super cheap in a flash sale forever ago. The Walking Dead kinda created the whole Georgia zombie apocalypse trope and tone. The game is like watching a very good adult cartoon where you occasionally influence what the protagonists do, and from time to time have to do an easy timed twitch thing. The voice acting is actually exceptionally good for an older game. Usually – with some notable exceptions – some people were always just phoning it with no context until quite recently. There are some atrocious examples of voice acting from the nineties and early noughties. By 2012 they were using directors and studios , but the directors and actors weren’t gamers and tended to overdo everything or send it up or just miss the point entirely. This game stands out in that I haven’t had anything take me out of it in terms of bullshit voice acting or absurd accents or false emphasis, and that is exceptionally rare for that era.
It is a game that is constantly asking difficult moral questions as you play through. It’s great and very upsetting but somehow beautiful with it. I’m up early tomorrow though so I’m gonna get an old fashioned book out now and find my bedtime story in that instead. There’ll probably be fewer zombies. Hopefully the zombies don’t make it into my dreams. But the thing I’ve learnt is they somehow seem to manage to get everywhere.
AlBarclay 