I spent a big part of my youth reading. Not anymore. Well, that's not totally correct. I spent a big chunk of my day reading, online. But not books. At least not as many as before. And certainly, not a lot of fiction. I don't even care about the reason, a small part of myself tells me that I should feel guilty about this, but I am not. At all. The fact is that while in Madrid I grabbed a book, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, by Eco. It's not a page turner, not one of those books that I will read in a couple of days. It's a book about a world that is no more, a world of childhood and books. A world about Salgari and Verne, two friends and teachers that I grew up with. Not surprisingly, these were inherited friends, from my dad and uncle. Fantasy worlds, distant lands, thrills that were not that different from some of the adventure games that replaced by leisure time a few years later. I haven't read Eco's third and fourth novel, but I am enjoying the fifth. Of course, his first,
The Name of the Rose is the best. I remember once reading Kusturica saying that people have basically one story that they can tell. Of course, they can tell more, but they have to borrow and later steal from others. Anyway, the rose may have been Eco's true story, but now it's also a game. And I am not talking about
The Abbey of Crime, the unauthorized Spanish ZX Spectrum game that followed the novel in glorious isometric graphics (free PC remake
here. Nope, now's the turn to a board game. "
Mystery of the Abbey". The funny thing is that what attracted me to the lattest Eco novel is that it is a book about lost memories. About the stories that everyday objects hold. I always wanted to make a game about it, digging in the past of objects. Probably some day. Meanwhile, I'll read
the book.
"Originally designed to be a substitute boyfriend for young single girls in the workforce, the doll has become an unexpected hit with elderly people across Japan". Enough said.
Mohammed Saleem, 18 months, lies dead in Bagdad. This has nothing to do with videogames and it shouldn't. We should be seeing this sort of pictures more in more unexpected places. This is what the fear and the greed of the richest government on Earth leads to. Who is the fucking terrorist here? (picture by Karim Kadim, from AP, awarded the Pulitzer Prize, 2005) . Update: Children malnutrition worse now than with Saddam's, according to United Nations.
