That’s right, kids, it’s time for another Linkdump, this time in the form of various things I’ve found on YouTube!

Yes, yes, try to contain your excitement.

• Somewhat Surprised Kitty — A parody of the Surprised Kitten, this one just doesn’t seem to manage anything beyond mild, uninterested surprise.
• Simon’s Cat: Snow Business — Anyone who has not yet been exposed to Simon’s Cat is seriously missing out, and the latest in the series does not disappoint.
• The Sims Horror Movie — “They won’t let me eat… they won’t let me sleep…” Yeah, this is pretty much exactly how I (and likely many others) play The Sims too.
• Green Man, Blue Cat — Once again, The Onion hits close to the mark with a rundown of the latest in a children’s book series that is wildly popular with adults.
• Tacos Exploding In Slow Motion — If the name alone doesn’t make you want to see this, then there is something wrong with you. Something very wrong with you.
• Maru’s Magic Show — Japan’s favourite cat, Maru, pleases the world once again with his entertaining little trick. Such a dumb, adorable feline.
• Damnatus: The Enemy Within — A remarkably well-made fan production of Warhammer 40,000 in eleven parts, German but with English subtitles.
• The Adventures of Lil Cthulhu — Lovecraftian horror turned into a childrens’ cartoon? You’d better believe it!
• Ferret Dance: A Series of Tubes — I’m really not sure what I could say about this one, other than it’s an adorable animation involving everyone’s favourite tube-rats.
• Cardboard — Eerie yet fascinating stop-motion animation involving numerous cardboard cut-out monsters making their way around a city.
• Post-It Note Atari — And one more stop-motion, this time dozens of post-it notes being used to simulate various old-school Atari games.
• Witch Hunt — The biggest pile of “what the fuck” I’ve seen in a while; looks like bizarre Garry’s Mod style dickery with GTA4.

“Blind with panic, deaf with the roar of the caged traffic, heart stopped on the road to Damascus, Paul sat at the roadside hunched up like a gull, like a bloody gull! As useless and as doomed as a syphilitic cartographer, a dying goat-herd, an infected leg, a kidney stone, blocking the traffic bound for Sandford and Exeter. He was not drunk, Esther, he was not drunk at all! All his roads and his tunnels and his paths led inevitably to this moment of impact! This is not a recorded natural condition. He should not be sat there with his chemicals and his circuit diagrams. He should not be sat there at all!”

Dear Esther — a Half-Life 2 mod which eschews the first-person shooter standards of combat and action in lieu of telling a haunting tale, one which changes each time the game is played. I first mentioned this in Linkdump #1, but I don’t feel as though that gives enough credit to this masterwork, so allow me this further indulgence as I revisit the island and attempt to illustrate what makes this “first-person ghost story” so special.

The game — if one can call it a game; Dear Esther is more an experiment in interactive storytelling — begins on a pier of an enigmatic and seemingly-abandoned island, a place both peaceful and chilling, oozing with atmosphere, coupled with an ever-changing story which differs from one play-through to the next. Indeed, if only one thing could be praised about this game, it would have to be the stunningly exquisite writing, realized fully by equally talented voice acting which easily puts many commercial efforts to shame. The story — presumably told by the protagonist, though the details are intentionally vague — recounts glimpses of details about characters both past and present, living and dead, with an ever-present edge of sorrow and despair, coupled perhaps with a hint of lucid madness. The island is a mystery in itself, strange messages and symbols scratched into the rock, an increasing sense of familiarity by the narrator, who could just as easily be alive or dead — is this real, the product of insanity, or perhaps a cold, desolate afterlife?

Completing the effect is a truly masterful musical score, which can also be downloaded from the website; my personal favourite is track 4, “Jakobson”, though the entire collection is frankly superb and aids supremely in building the powerful atmosphere of the game. If you hadn’t guessed by this point, atmosphere is precisely what Dear Esther is all about — there are no puzzles to overcome, enemies to defeat, or mazes to traverse, only an island rich with story and personality, one which cannot be adequately described and must instead be experienced.

There is little else I can say about the game without revealing elements of the unfolding plot; if a cerebral, moving experience is something that you crave, I strongly recommend a play-through — or three! — of this magnificent offering.

I read a comic once when I was a kid, where this guy’s body was controlled from inside by all these tiny versions of himself, like some warped kind of Matryoshka doll marionette. I presume it was intended as light-hearted humour, though in retrospect there’s an oddly sinister edge to the concept.

I thought about that while I was shaving; the gel I use is oddly similar in appearance and texture to a male bodily fluid that I care not to think too much about.

How many hairs? one of them would say, staring in wonder through from the back of my mechanical eyeballs, watching the sink fill up with discarded hair. It’s like a little Vietnam in that sink. Body hair instead of trees, but smells about the same.

Many, sir, the other would reply from within the tangled mass of rusting cables inside my brain.

Many.

Life, such that it is: a conglomeration of supremely wasted time, irradiated eyeballs slowly wasting away staring at imaginary worlds — worlds of Warcraft, indeed — while my corporeal form gradually decays under the malnutritious regime of Pepsi Max, abhorrently-branded “Xtreme” Pringles, and bland microwave ready-meals which provide barely the minimal amount of sustenance in order to avoid untimely death.

So now you can stop wondering.

It's all fun and games until somebody loses an eye.

Now there’s something I never thought I’d see — thanks, perhaps, to my one ill-fated former experience in the Ahn’Qiraj region, with a pick-up group so mythically inept that it instilled a deep terror of that whole place in my mind, a group so thoroughly uncoordinated and inexperienced that I’m surprised they could even unsheathe their own swords without falling upon them. In retrospect, part of me wishes they had, but I digress.

While being somewhat of a self-indulgent segue and not entirely relevant to the point at hand, given Ahn’Qiraj was designed back in the days when level 60 was the highest rung on the ladder, it does seem like the game is changing — evolving, some may say — into something which is, to put it bluntly, easier. With a mass appeal that already extends across the globe to people who would never normally play an MMORPG, it makes perfect sense for Blizzard to cater to their biggest paying audience, that being the oft-derided casual gamers. As someone who has played WoW on-and-off since launch, and seen the ‘hard mode’ of things before the way became paved for the newer players, I can understand and even relate to the bitterness some feel, with newer players having their hands held through content that the older players had to slog through. We also had to walk to work uphill both ways in the snow, and all that.

In the years since launch, the world (of Warcraft) has changed around us in numerous subtle — and not-so-subtle — ways. With the upcoming expansion Cataclysm promising to rend the world into something new and unfamiliar, sometimes it’s easy to lose sight of the smaller changes that happened ‘under the hood’, so to speak. Once upon a time owning an epic mount was something of a badge of honour, an achievement in its own right, yet now we see freshly-rolled characters charging mounts through the jungles of Stranglethorn Vale with wild abandon, tearing up the roads as early as level 40 on cheaper-than-ever epic mounts, and even soaring through the skies of Outland shortly after their arrival.

Speaking of flying mounts, Hellfire Peninsula has certainly become a lot less of a headache-inducing nightmare compared to previous visits as older characters, and I’m sure Squick — my venerable shaman — has only the happiest Tauren feelings about the whole thing. Stranglethorn Vale and Desolace, once the banes of re-rollers everywhere, are now almost enjoyable. Heirloom gear with bonuses to experience provide a smoother run. City reputation is no longer the stuff of tears and misery. Even the classes are easier to play than ever — I for one am immensely grateful that, not only do shamans have abilities to provide a built-in totem bar, but we also have fewer, more general-use totems instead of a million and one to cover all the minutiae.

In a way, patches 2.0 and 3.0 were more than mere patches — it’s as if we’re playing World of Warcraft 2 and World of Warcraft 3 already, with changes and improvements to the game system happening fluidly and almost inconceivably around us, a perspective driven further home by Cataclysm’s promises to reshape the now rather dusty old-world, which is shoddy and outdated compared to Blizzard’s more recent offerings. Rather than other games — such as EverQuest, which attempted to re-make itself from scratch with a newer engine and modernized gameplay in EverQuest II — it seems as though Blizzard consider World of Warcraft a work-in-progress, a piece of art which is constantly being changed and improved, with the old, ugly parts cut out and replaced as seamlessly as possible to follow the game’s constant, organic evolution.

I can’t help but miss the old days, though. Sure, they were the days when only the best of the best could even hope to acquire any kind of good gear, back when trying to find a group was a case of standing in the middle of Orgrimmar yelling, “LF4M UBRS, NEED TANK!” But no matter how clumsy, how shoddy (at least, compared to Wrath and future promised offerings), how brutally unfair and obnoxiously limiting the old-world was, it’ll still always hold some small place in my heart — a very, very small place. In a crazy sort of way, some part of me will be a little sad to see it gone, when the world is broken and reshaped forever — or, at least, until the next expansion.