An Hour and a Half I Won't Get Back

I refer, sadly, to the somewhat extended guest lecture at WOLAS this evening... Probably the most tedious talk I'll ever sit through and, yes, I intended the implication that it extends into the forseeable future, covering lectures I have not yet witnessed.

It was also a prime example of everything one should not do when giving a presentation... Far too much text on the PowerPoint slides, far too many images of essentially the same thing, and far too much of the 'presentation' was simply reading the text from screen, some time after most of the audience would have finished reading it themselves.

These things are meant to be an hour, tops (so the members can make use of the tea/coffee-making facilities on site), and the extra half hour was positively painful.

At least the earlier part of my day was more interesting - a friend and former colleague popped round for lunch and a crash course in Wii gaming. It wasn't the most successful attempt, so I shall have to think carefully about a follow-up. I don't have many multi-player games that aren't rather complicated, so most of the time was spent demonstrating rather than actually playing... Wii Sports Resort was a bust because I only have the one WiiMotion Plus enabled remote, but tennis and bowling were pretty good fun in Wii Sports. Tron Evolution: Battle Grids proved to be just as unrewarding as a two player game as it is single... Many of the games are basically unfathomable, but the Light Cycle battles were good fun, and reasonably easy to control. Okami... looks wonderful, but the controller sensitivity (even without WiiMotion Plus attached) makes it all rather awkward, and demonstrating it rapidly became quite frustrating. Sin and Punishment was much surer ground - an on-the-rails shooter, much like the pirate game she's enjoyed at the Park Royal arcade - but she was upset about being relegated to a support role, with no on-screen character to worry about. Not quite sure why two-player mode works like that...

I was considering an early(-ish) night, but noticed that one of the ill-conceived sequels to John Carpenter's Vampires is on tonight... so I really have to stay up for that. Crappy Horror ahoy!