Category Archives: Game

My music album challenge

Something completely different for today – I was challenged on Facebook a while ago by a friend to name ten albums which have had a great influence on my life. I found the whole exercise to be hugely rewarding, and got a great deal of pleasure out of searching back through years of memory to identify suitable items.

So I decided that it would be silly to squander the work on ten posts scattered here and there in Facebook, and so have gathered them all together into one place – for my own convenience as much as anything else!

So here we go…

Cover image - Yes... Going for the One (Wiki)
Cover image – Yes… Going for the One (Wiki)

1. The first is an album which I first discovered at university (feeling very risqué at the cover), and which I still listen to now. It’s Going for the One, by Yes, full of tracks which I love (and a few I’m not so struck by). The cover image is courtesy of Wiki…
Here’s a YouTube link to Awaken, perhaps the finest track on the album, and long enough it is in two parts…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=or6GSK3hvM4

and

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CztdAyz-A44

 

Cover image - Pink Floyd... Dark Side of the Moon (Wiki)
Cover image – Pink Floyd… Dark Side of the Moon (Wiki)

2. The second album goes a little bit further back than the first – back into school days in fact when this album grabbed all of us by storm. Yes, it was Pink Floyd‘s Dark Side of the Moon (cover image courtesy of WIki). Originally a London group, I have never heard them play live.

 

Cover image - Wishbone Ash... Argus (Wiki)
Cover image – Wishbone Ash… Argus (Wiki)

3. Day 3 of the album challenge took me back to university days again. This time it’s Wishbone Ash, and Argus, something I listened to over and over. Another British band, this time from the West Country (rumour had it that they were the loudest band ever to play Exeter University). The YouTube extract is Time Was… a splendid track to introduce this album

 

Cover image - Peter Finger... The Elf King (Amazon)
Cover image – Peter Finger… The Elf King (Amazon)

4. Day 4 marks a transition from things that influenced me as listener to things which I tried to imitate as player. And I start with Peter Finger, a German acoustic guitarist who I tried (almost entirely unsuccessfully) to emulate. He did wonderful stuff with open tuning as well as conventional. This album – The Elf King – is the first of his that I came across.
The track I’ve chosen from this excellent album is Sabine… well worth a listen…

 

Cover image - John Fahey... The Best of John Fahey (Amazon)
Cover image – John Fahey… The Best of John Fahey (Amazon)

5. Day 5 continues the theme of albums that influenced me as player. Peter Finger’s music was always seriously above my ability level, but John Fahey was a different story, and I tackled a lot of his work. He played a lot of pieces in dropped-D or various open tunings, of which this – On the Sunny Side of the Ocean – is one.
And in a never-before-heard-by-the-general-public move, I am linking to a very old and quite noisy recording of me playing this wonderful piece…

 

Cover image - John Renbourn... The Hermit (Wiki)
Cover image – John Renbourn… The Hermit (Wiki)

6. Day 6 brought another of my playing influences. This time it’s John Renbourn, and out of all his sundry guitar work I have picked something from The Hermit. Specifically, it’s a selection of three pieces originally by the Irish harpist Turlough O’Carolan, transcribed for guitar. The pieces are
1. Lamentation of Owen Roe O’Neill
2. Lord Inchiquin
3. O’Carolan’s Concerto
I played these on both guitar and lute (for a while) and loved them. The rest of the album – and the rest of Renbourn – is well worth dipping into as well!

Cover image - 10 Classic Rags ( (Stefan Grossman's Guitar Workshop, http://www.guitarvideos.com)
Cover image – 10 Classic Rags ( (Stefan Grossman’s Guitar Workshop, http://www.guitarvideos.com)

7. Day 7 was another playing choice, and this time it’s a compendium called 10 Classic Rags for Guitar by Scott Joplin, as played by various artists.
I’ve chosen Weeping WIllow, played by Ton Engels, not because I know very much about Ton or have listened to much of his playing, but because this was a rag I worked on a lot. I’m not saying I ever got especially good at it, but it’s a nice, pleasant but challenging piece to play. I’m sure it’s available still in tablature somewhere…

Cover image - Mike Oldfield... Tubular Bells (Amazon)
Cover image – Mike Oldfield… Tubular Bells (Amazon)

8. Day 8 took me back again to my listening choices rather than playing… and back a lot of years to an album that hugely affected me and a great many other people… Tubular Bells, by Mike Oldfield. How many of us practiced saying “Mandolin” in the privacy of our rooms?
Here’s a link to the full album, original (remastered) version…

And if you want a very different – and very compelling – version, here it is live at Montreux in 1981…

 

Cover image - Camel... The Snowgoose (Amazon)
Cover image – Camel… The Snowgoose (Amazon)

9. Day 9, and once again it’s a band which I started listening to many years ago, and still do now. I even heard them once at what was then Guildford Civic Hall (it’s much posher now and called by a much grander name). The group – Camel… the album, well it;s the first of theirs I got to know, namely The Snowgoose, a thoroughly splendid instrumental piece, thematically built around the Dunkirk “small ships” rescue.
The track? Well, it’s not an easy choice, especially as the pieces flow and merge into each other, but I’ve gone for Flight of the Snowgoose, a central part of the whole album…
Whole album

Flight of the Snowgoose

 

Cover image - Kayak... Merlin, Bard of the Unseen (Amazon)
Cover image – Kayak… Merlin, Bard of the Unseen (Amazon)

10. And finally for Day 10, last one of the series, I thought I would come into the present day, and a band which (surprisingly) I only encountered recently. The band: Kayak… the album I have chosen: Merlin, Bard of the Unseen, with its overt Arthurian theme.
Album cover courtesy of Amazon .
And the specific track is Lady of the Lake (Niniane)


Why this? Well, my own writing is tending to draw on Arthurian themes just now, and Ninane in particular is a fascinating figure who (in time to come) will get a bit more narrative treatment from me in her own story…

That’s it folks, all ten albums, spanning something like 35 years of my musical life! And a great trip it has been… and will no doubt continue to be…

Senet, ‘Scenes from a Life’, and mobile app programming

Well, all three of these have been quite prominent this week. Senet is an ancient Egyptian board game, considered by many people to be an ancestor of backgammon. Available evidence is for the most part from tomb drawings and artefacts, with a small amount of textual material as well. It is not clear how far through the various levels of ancient Egyptian society enthusiasm for the game went – the tomb evidence by its very nature preferentially informs us about elite activities and interests, and we simply do not have information either way about other strata of the culture. Senet was used, apparently, not just directly as a game, but also as a religious or spiritual symbol of the passage through this life and the next. You could liken this very loosely to today’s playing cards, which similarly straddle the long gulf between between gaming and divination in different people’s hands.

Scenes from a Life makes use of Senet quite extensively, and I have assumed that it was played very widely by all kinds of people. Sometimes in the book it is just a game, but much more frequently it features on a metaphorical level. So the journeys that take place through the book might be interpreted by the characters as like movements in the game, with all of the anticipation and anxiety that this brings about. Or there might be an analogy drawn between someone’s behaviour and a game play strategy. If, as I suspect might have been the case, Senet was something of a national game back in New Kingdom Egypt then this is inevitable. Think how sports fans tend to lace their conversation and world-view with ideas and set-piece moves drawn from their favourite sport, whether football, chess, baseball, table-tennis or whatever.

Senet app icon

So that brings us through to mobile apps. Some long-term followers of this blog will know that I have a Senet game available on the various app stores (pick your favourite store and search for DataScenes Development, or just directly for Senet). But over the last few weeks I have been working on a new version. Alongside the paid-for version there will be a free (well, advert-supported) one which has a number of geeky techie advantages.

  • By using a different underlying technology I am able to release it for a lot of phones and tablets of quite modest specification (lots more than was constrained by the previous tech choice).
  • I have integrated the app with the web so there is a sort-of leaderboard feature for those who fancy themselves as modern-day Senet champs.
  • I have taken the opportunity to rework a lot of code that had got more and more like tangled spaghetti. Anyone in the IT trade will recognise this as refactoring, and with my QA hat on I am completely aware just how many bugs get introduced by enthusiastic developers doing just this… but my code will be different…

Senet splash screen But I have also been finding some of the down-sides with the new development tool (it’s the Corona SDK for the true IT geeks). This is based on a graphics engine called OpenGL – which is magnificent for things like displaying images and moving them round the screen, but really quite poor at laying out simple text in – say – some help pages. Ironically I think I have spent longer getting the in-app help to work properly than the mechanics of the game itself.

Now, the characters of Scenes from a Life did not have smart-phones with them on their journeys. But they did enjoy the game of Senet – and you can enjoy it along with them! Realistically Senet the free game will be released quite some time before Scenes from a Life hits the bookshelves, so it can act as a sort of preview…