caraig | Some Interesting Things

Things are a little stressier here than I would have liked. Naught to be done for it, and it's better than New York any day of the week. But I'll have more on that later. First, a few things.

Enter the dungeon! -- Apparently someone made a blogtoy that takes an LJ and turns it into a dungeon. 'Twisty passages' indeed....
Lately I've been playing a computer game called STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl It's not as polished as FEAR, and not as well-produced as Half-Life 2 but it's still really very well done. The town of Priyapet is almost so spot-on to the real Priyapet that it's scary. It appears to be based loosely on a short story called Roadside Picnic by a Soviet-era SF author, whose name escapes me. The game started me on a quick web search and fascination with the devastation left, not only by the Chernobyl disaster, but also by the evacuation of the entire town and region. It's amazing at what happened there and how much devastation was wrought... and also how quickly nature has just reclaimed the previous man-man structures.
Anyway, I bring this up because it turns out that the United States has it's own version of Chernobyl, predating that disaster by twenty or so years: Welcome to Centralia.

More later, I'm sure, when my head is on straight and I'm not going too nuts. Pax.