Holiday in Zenobia
This April Susi, I and a bunch of our pals left for an eagerly awaited and well deserved diving holiday in Cyprus. Our destination was the city of Larnaca, or more exactly the wreck of a 172 meter long ro-ro ferry Zenobia, which is one of the world’s top ten wreck diving locations. Mv Zenobia was built in 1979 in Sweden and it sank on its’ maiden voyage in 1980 after the shipboard computers malfunctioned and filled the ballast tanks with water. The ship sank at a place where the sea bottom is 42 meters deep. It’s lying on the seabed on its side, with the starboard side reaching up to 16-18 meters. The visibility is about 20-50 meters and there is very little current, so it’s like made for both beginning and more experienced divers.
(Check out the full photo set in Flickr!)
The orientation and briefing map of Zenobia.
Radium Age Apocalyptic Fiction – Getting Rid of Writers’ Block
Part of my new year’s manifesto was to get rid of a long time writers’ block that has been plaguing my fiction writing ambitions. Recently, thanks to my pal Ripa, I ran into a micro fiction contest hosted by Hilobrow.com. The idea was to write 250 word long apocalyptic story set in the radium age, meaning roughly between the years 1900 and 1935. So, I grabbed my laptop, headed off to one of my favourite bars, grabbed a pint and set to work.
And yes, it was worth it – didn’t win the competition, but got into the top three. Mine can be found here, and also below.
****
The windows of the zeppelin’s bridge were opaque with frost and rime. The captain of the airship stood half out of the cabin door on the walkway, shouting instructions to the pilot. Sudden gusts of arctic wind made the slowly descending airship sway and their howl fought with the roar and whine of the ship’s engines.
Professor Väisälä sat on a bench in the back of the bridge, trying to stay out of the way.
The sun winked out, leaving the widows milky white instead of painfully bright panes of golden light. There were shouts, the air anchors were lowered and the ship lurched when they caught.
“Arctic circle plus ten, approximately 20 kilometers out of the former city of Rovaniemi”, the navigator intoned.” Väisälä stepped out to the catwalk outside the bridge to survey the shipwreck, which spanned hundreds of meters of the shadowy arctic landscape.
The wreck of the previous expedition had been spotted by the steam plume of their zeppelin’s Fermi-pile, which was still melting through the ice. Parts of the airship FZ Aino still hung on the kilometer high ice wall that loomed over Väisälä’s ship. The captain scratched his beard covered with hoar. “In the night, with the snowstorm, it must have looked like a cloud bank.”
Professor Väisälä let out a wavering sigh. “But they have proved the theories and confirmed the terrible conclusions. The holocene is over, and the sixth ice age is upon us. God save us all.”
Games Are Growing Up – Case: Heavy Rain
I’ve been a gamer since 1983 when I got my Commodore 64, and since 2000 I’ve been amongst other things a professional gaming journalist. There is one thing about games that has started to irritate me more and more as the time has passed: although the gamers, the game industry and everybody in between is clamoring that the gaming is not just a hobby for kids anymore, story-wise almost every game seems to be written for kids or fratboys, or at the best case for “the average consumer”.
Stop the press - there are tasteful sex scenes in games!
Hold on, you say, there’s plenty of games with an 18+ age limit, so there’s plenty of games for adults, right? Well, yes – if you define “adult content” to mean boobs and blood, and even on that front games are horribly handicapped on the boobs side of the issue. Go on, list all the games that handle sex and relationships in a non-dramatic, non-comical and mature way, I dare you. True, Mass Effect had a tasteful super soft-core sex scene, Dragon Age: Origins handled hetero and gay romances in a very nifty way and several games, such as the first Still Life, Hitman: Blood Money, Gears of War 2 (the scene) and The Darkness have some sequences that makes violence feel downright nasty and horrible. The depiction of violence as a bad thing hasn’t got that much press, but holy hell, mention sex in a video game and both the mainstream and gaming media are on fire. Surprisingly the moral panic of mainstream press over for example Mass Effect was often far less embarrassing to read than gaming press, which was far to often on the level of “OMG GAMEZ HAZ BOOBZ”. Way to go, branding gaming as a hobby for adults.
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