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You could change the title to "Inane Claims to Fame"?

I'm disabled, and fall well within the bounds of the narrow disabled-people-only use of "lame", and I just took the word as used here to be in its wider common use of "a bit rubbish" - what is now the most common use. It really doesn't have any pejorative implications. No offence needed!

To add to my previous Cliff Richard anecdote - I remembered that, a few years later, a similar thing happened with Rick Wakeman - he came to give a talk about God, too - unconvincingly, I thought. The organiser this time was (I think) the woman who was the previous owner of my house - might be a year or two out for that. Saw him again in the chippy just down the road at lunch time having sausage and chips.

My mum once met Cliff Richard.

In the 90s Cliff visited the place where my mum (and subsequently I) worked. He did a talk about God or something. My mum, being PA for either the CEO or deputy (can't remember which, she did both at various times) had to arrange the visit and pick him up from the station.

She said she was a bit starstruck (being a fan in her youth) and didn't really say much. There was a photo of them together in the local paper.

That's it.

I played Laser Tag with Sir Terry Pratchett's daughter.

That's not lame! Sure, the Laser Tag part helps bring it down, but only if you're 50 and you were doing it yesterday! And if you were doing anything with RP yesterday, that would be cool. Even Laser Tag.

I've stood next to Tony Todd whilst smoking a cigarette, but was too scared to say anything.

This one isn't lame either! Tony Todd is one of the very few famous people I'd actually quite like to meet.

I bought "Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space" by Spiritualized (the super-limited 12 mini-CD boxed version) from Virgin Megastore in Carlisle moments after the only other copy they'd got in stock had been bought by Noel Gallagher.

My parents met the parents of the guy who wrote them Shadows of the Apt novels. And not only once!

The teacher at my school who ran the computer room is the father of the guy who did the ZX Spectrum conversion of BMX Simulator.

Actually I also met him, just remembered - he came to my house and he gave me a copy of a Spectrum assembler on cassette.

More or less exactly how my playthrough went, unsurprisingly, except I (by pure luck, I assume) chose non-dying paths and favourable dice rolls - up to this very same point; entering the dungeon proper - well a little further on: climbing up a ladder and out though a door, with an inventory addition already! From that point on, things have gone less favourably... so far.

I'm quite enjoying it so far, although one thing that annoyed a little is that the stamina is all up and down and up and down a lot already, before you even get into the dungeon. Even in the first paragraph you lose a point - before you've even made one choice! Bit silly.

I think a lot of the time it's a case of people want to feel like they have the answers to important questions; to the point that they prefer a simple wrong answer to a complicated correct one, or an unknown one. "I don't know" is just unacceptable when there's an answer that seems simple enough to be possible and not require too much thought.

People also like to feel like they're in on a secret. They know what's really going on, and that makes them better than the "sheeple" who just believe what they're told. The notion that they might be missing the point is lost on them, and, at its worst, they see every attempt to educate them as either the actions of "poor brainwashed fools", or of further evidence that everyone else is "in on it".

They're a slave to Occam's razor, Dunning-Kruger, and their own insecurities.

i've been told the third panel here is...harsh

That is harsh. Having an infant take out Dredd after only three panels is... daring.  I'm assuming that's what's happening off-panel there.

Panel 4: "Goo" facing direct to reader with a self-satisfied grin and blowing the barrel of a smoking gun.


I'll let someone more qualified explain advent... I really started posting properly just before the last one, so I didn't take part. Not sure what I'd do now, tbf.

let me know if i'm just spamming the thread!

This spam tastes so good!

You know you'll be expected to make a full comic story for the advent calendar, now, right?

I'd have needed a magnifying glass

heh. I did need a magnifying glass. If I'd encountered this as a 20-year old in 1991 I could probably have seen it perfectly clearly - now... not so much

I had a look at the musical one yesterday, assuming that the mechanism for solving it followed the same sort of rough concept as the clock one - namely that a signifier was being used to represent a step-increment of some kind, and that the values (in this case note positions) were representing letters.

It's a simpler puzzle, just with a far less obvious solution.

Given that the clock one used the hand length as a multiplier, I thought that the ticks on the notes might represent the same concept - allowing more letters than one musical stave allowed - so no tick represented one stave, one tick represented the next stave, two ticks a third, and so dividing the alphabet into 3 chunks.

You can't divide 26 by 3, or by any number that is cleanly represented by the number of positions on the stave, without leaving a remainder, so probably not all letters are representable. But that's probably fine since who need an Y or Z, eh? Apart from fantasy fiction...

ahhhhh... 

Anyway, the hard part here was working out which group of letters were represented - ie, how far up the alphabet did you need to go before switching to the next stave - all the while not even being sure I was on the right track with any of this.

Also, the staves work the in the reverse order to the way you'd logically expect them to - maybe it's more intuitive to someone who didn't stop learning violin after grade 1.

It worked out, so all's well. Got to say though, it was quite tedious even just doing the translation once I'd got the solution. That alone would've slowed my gameplay down.

And I have no idea how likely it is that your average 12-year old could have got it. Too hard for the target audience.

Is that the meat you need to give to the Piranha Poodles?

Yes! It was something to do with a floorboard, and then you had to cook it or something. I can't remember. There was another thing later in the game where you had to remove something that was resting on a sleeping pirate, and no matter what you did, he'd wake up. Damn that game! I loved it.

I didn't think that the clock thing was that hard - the answer was given to you in the question, effectively. Although, there wasn't any way you could be sure of that until you'd tried it, which is what I did. Somewhat ironically, the more of a person who thinks their way through a problem you are, the harder it gets. Instead of thinking about all the possibilities, just try one!

What took the thinking time for me was working out that the length of the 'hands' determined whether or not the hands have been round the clock once already or not.
I was thinking this is an hour hand so the number is the hour and this is a minute hand so the number is the minute, and it wasn't.

And you don't need to know the symbol to get the reference, since it's just the next number in the sequence. Although there's only one way to draw the missing symbol from that number, so it's easy to work that out.

there's some really unfathomable puzzles

I haven't played it, but I've skimmed through before and seen some visual puzzles. I saw the clock one first and, even though I wasn't playing it, stopped to try to work it out. I should've been doing something more useful - like checking all the other books in the job lot I'd just bought for damages, but instead I spent an hour trying to work that out - and that's in spite of the possibility that I might've needed some clue given in the game earlier! I did eventually work it out.

I know there's another musical one, and if there are more like that, I can imagine it rather halts the progression in gameplay.

Makes me think of trying to work out how to get the bit of meat away from the bird in Monkey Island. Days! I lost days on that!

The new thrills start next Prog 2401

I've been sifting through the fabulous gift of fabulous free progs from the fabulous CrazyFoxMachine and I noticed that for the last several years' worth of progs there seems to be a random issue every now and then that's in a stiffer, higher quality cover. I started to investigate and these seems to all be jump-on issues (or maybe specials too). Is this a known thing that happens?