I hate winter

Keeps you warm in winter

The Tick in Winter

Winter albums

Winter Weather

Cold Winter

I got another free product in the mail the other day to review — a PS2 game called Cold Winter.

It was rated M (for Mature), but I'm not much of a gamer so I enlisted my 10-year-old son to play it with me.

It's something of an espionage adventure that starts in a Chinese prison. You are Andrew Sterling, disavowed secret agent of some kind, and you have to fight your way out. I gather there's a lot more after that, but we never found out (keep reading).

Cold Winter earned its M rating: in one of the first cut scenes, Sterling gets tortured and has his finger bent back until it breaks (yes, it's as bad as it sounds). Thoughout the rest of the game, when he's holding a pistol so you can see his hands on the screen, he flexes his left hand as if it's still stiff from the break however many months ago. And when you get shot, there's a lot blood. And...chunks. And then there's the guy who gets killed sitting on the toilet, and just kind of slumps there. It's not elegant.

Anyway, the storyline didn't hold our interest so much, so we quit that and just went to two-player mode — you know, Capture the Flag and all that. It turns out that Cold Winter is a pretty good first person shooter.

It tends toward the realistic side of combat, rather than the cinematic. There are a lot of weapons to pick from, and they have realistic touches: you run really slow while carrying the rocket launcher (tough to do much but camp), and if you fire anything more than a short burst from the MP5, the recoil kicks it up so you're shooting at nothing but air. The controls are good and, before long, we were running around blowing each other to smithereens for a couple of hours.

The gas grenades are the best part. You can lob one and seal off an area with poison gas. Your opponent can only wait until it dissipates enough to make a run through it (though I'm willing to bet there's a gas mask in the game somewhere — we were two busy killing each other to bother looking).

If you get exposed to gas, your vision starts getting blurry and you may go down for the count, which makes you pretty picky as to whether you should risk making a run for it. (In fact, you can get shot in this game, but not die right away — you limp away from a fire fight only to lose too much blood and go down around the corner or something.)

There's a poetic joy to trapping your opponent in some alley with a cloud of poisonous gas, then just firing rocket after rocket blindly into the cloud until he comes stumbling out.

Later, as we were cycling through the game options to play, we found an interesting one called "Headmatch." It's like the flag-based games where you get a point for every second or so you're holding the flag. Except there's no flag. It's the "decapitated head of an unknown man." Seriously.

When you start a headmatch, first you have to find the head, which could be anywhere. So me and the boy are running around the rooftops of some Morrocan town, looking for a decapitated head, which was pretty funny, actually.

He finds it first and yells, "I've got the head! I've got the head!" I tell him to wait so I can come over to look at it. Then I tell him to turn around so my guy can crouch down and look under it while he holds it aloft by its hair.

Then, suddenly, it hit me: I'm the worst parent ever.

A Walk in Winter

A few photos from a walk on a winter day.

Alan Burlison always has such nice pictures and stories from his own walks around the Peak District that I thought I'd have a go with my urban landscape. No fields of heather or peat bogs here, but it's home. :)

We took a nice walk around the southern edge of Helsinki and I needed to finish off a roll of film. We wound up walking out on the ice which made me nervous even though it appeared to be a very popular Sunday pastime for quite a few people. Where I come from, only stupid people who want to die walk out on the invariably thin ice, but Finland's ice is much thicker so that only a few people manage to fall through each year. :) It's strange to walk on the ice where in summertime there are only boats. The abandoned fuel station looked out of place and abandoned in spite of the people with strollers, with pets, with friends all wandering on the ice around it. It may be winter here, but we don't let the cold keep us inside all the time.

Winter nostalgia

It is tough to imagine anyone being nostalgic for this past winter in New England but perhaps this photo of sammies in the snow will do the trick.  It comes to us from Willie Stromeyer, whom I met as an 8-year-old son of a friend.  He's now married and living in Upstate New York.

Winter Depression

A Winter Garden in Spring

A few photos from a trip to the Helsinki Winter Garden just before Easter. The garden is enclosed in a Victorian era greenhouse and hosts quite a nice succulent room, palm room and room for various seasonal plants. Easter brings little baby chicks to the Win ter Garden that little kids press their faces up to the glass to watch intently as they cheep and hop around. Tulips and daffodils also add a splash of colour to the landscape inside the green canopy. It's free to visit during its rather limited hours of operation and the outdoor garden is beautiful during the summer when the flowers are in bloom. It reminds me a lot of the Jewel Box, an art deco conservatory, and Tower Grove Park, a Victorian walking park, in St. Louis quite a bit since they were all built during a time that building public gardens for all people to enjoy was popular. I still miss living next to Tower Grove Park as it was one of the most beautiful spots in the city.

Bad winter 'threatens gas supply'

Winter blast causes problems

Random winter photos

I had a bunch of photos that didn't really have a theme or a home so I put them together in a random winter 2004 photo collection.

There is also a new craneporn gallery since I can't seem to stop taking pictures of cranes now that Paul craneporn Mison got me hooked. :)

Premiership set for winter break

Ah, Copenhagen in the depths of winter

Winter Storm Reaches From Kan. to S.C.
(AP)

Ah, Midwest Winter Weather

Winter Wonderland Icons 1.0

Winter holidays in Russia.

Preparing for the Winter Garden

Winter approaches in Alaska

A friend in Alaska sent this email in response to a postcard from warm sunny Greece:

"So, you are there...and... well...we are here... in the snow, sleet, rain, pestilence, fog, and darkness.  What more can be said?  The dogs are howling, the bears are hibernating, and we are hunkered in our camp, slowly cooking cassoulet while riding out the storm.  In fact, it has been so bad here that one of our local judges, Sam Adams, age 47, died of a heart attack while on a moose hunt a week ago, and he had to stay put with his hunting party for a few days before the clouds could clear and the plane could land. Can you imagine being one of the guys around the fire, wondering whether to put cards in Sam's hand, or look for another moose, etc."

Winter Break for Web Site

Shark Tank: Enough With Winter Already!

MS drug to combat winter asthma

MS Announces Availability Of 3 Winter
Fun Packs for XP

WINTER SMOG ALERT IN MID-WEST

news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050203/ap_on_sc/a ir_pollution_2
track this site | 2 links

New! The Winter Scenery for Microsoft
Windows

Welcoming Snowbirds from Nuclear Winter

Ryanair warns of winter shake-out

Rovers May Survive Martian Winter

Summer or Winter, the Yankees Show the
Red Sox How to Win

Winter Storm in Texas Kills at Least 5
(AP)

Official Winter Olympics Site

Cthulhu-in-a-box

RUN!

Cthulhu Calls 1.0

"Cthulhu Chick Tract"

Jack Chick meets Cthulhu.

Call of Cthulhu silent film nearly done

The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society have nearly finished making a 1920s/30s style black and white silent film of "The Call of Cthulhu", and they've put a quicktime trailer on their site.

It looks really bizarre: they seem to have done quite a good job of mimicking the visual style of films of the period, particularly the horrifying rituals of the cultists.

Eight-foot-tall statues of Cthulhu for
sale

Cthulhu at the Nova Express coffee house
[Flickr]

Winter Solstice