I am on a bus. It is very late. I have a handleless wood file which I drum on my head in time with the tapping of my foot. The seat beside me is vacant and, although the bus is quite full, I am only aware of one other person, an old Chinese woman who sits directly behind me. I gaze out of the window at the late-night restaurants, and hope I am in time to catch one open, but my watch reveals that it is past one o’clock, so I am already too late. We pass some which appear to be open, and I feel a strong urge to get off but I suppress it until we are far past. I decide to get off before my stop as it is quicker to walk from here. The road ahead is dark and dead and, as I proceed, I am uncertain that this is actually the right way after all, but I can always work out where I am when I get to the end. I can see lights up ahead now, so I decide to cycle as it will be much quicker. I sense movement far behind me and hear a child calling out in the distance, ‘Daddy, Daddy’. I cycle on regardless, towards the lights, but as the child gets nearer I realise in horror that he is calling to me. I pedal frantically in an attempt to escape but the harder I do so the cruder my bike becomes until, finally, I must pick it up and run. The child is almost upon me now so I give up flight and turn to face him. He is pushing a huge, black thing on stone wheels, it is hideously medieval. ‘Mummy wants to make some changes to you’ he intones solemnly. I scream in panic and hurl my bicycle at him, by now nothing but a flimsy piece of cardboard.

I’ve been wasting hours on Terraria (which is an awesome game btw) and here’s the result, my own castle (click on the image to get a full-size version)

This was all mined and constructed in-game using my trusy Molten Pick-axe, Molten Ham-Axe, Jet-Boots and Ivy Whip. My two boys helped me a bit too, especially on the mining (those blue dungeon bricks are damn tedious to mine!)

If you want to download the Terraria world file, here it is (zipped up for efficiency, make sure you unzip it before using it!):

terrariaCastleWorld.zip

N.B. Please be careful when copying this world file into your Terraria Worlds folder. Because it’s named WORLD1.WLD it will likely overwrite your own first world file unless you rename it!

Unfortunately, development and support for Colors! DS Homebrew has come to an end, presumably so Jens (the Developer) can proceed with and concentrate on legitimate DS software. However, I have taken the liberty to host the last few available versions for the forseeable future.

Check it out on the Colors! DS page.

Rosy again. At this rate I’ll soon be able to draw her from memory!

Woot! Some of my puzzles have been published in a Sudoku Magazine! Sudoku Xtra by Dr. Gareth Moore is a really nice puzzle magazine that contains loads of cool and unusual variations on the standard 9×9 sudoku, as well as a ton of new puzzle types each month. If you like logic puzzles check it out here:

http://www.sudokuxtra.com

My puzzles first appear in issue 10, but I’ve submitted a ton of puzzles so hopefully they will be making return appearances in future issues too!

I’ll be posting some new 8x8s here shortly…

Here’s a few pictures from last Wednesdays class. The model was Heather, a total noob (in the nicest sense of the word) as she’d never posed before, and certainly never naked! She did very well for her first time!

We’ve just come back from Sa Coma in Majorca where we spent 11 days in the blistering heat and rain. We were quite near the beach which smelled a little funny but had great sand for building with. Here’s some photos of the castle me and the boys came up with.

We had some pretty severe snow during the night and when we got up the following morning we heard that both my sons schools were closed for the day and there were no trains running from Manchester to Liverpool. So we all stayed home for the day and built a Snowman! Here he is.

..had two little toys. Or so sayeth the great oracle Sir Rolf of Harris.

All these two have are guilty looks…

aw.. aren’t they cute… at least they were back then, that was a good few years ago and now they’re a right pair of little swines. That’s Jacob on the left and Matthew on the right. And yes, despite their cute looks, they are both mine… If I take a more recent photo of them one day you’ll hear about it here first!