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Web Wanderings - Of raccoons and holes

Yorkton This Week’s editorial staff takes readers on an explorative journey around the Internet, searching out the best in videos, podcasts, webcomics, music and anything else that catches their collective eyes which might interest our readers.
Donut
Donut County

Yorkton This Week’s editorial staff takes readers on an explorative journey around the Internet, searching out the best in videos, podcasts, webcomics, music and anything else that catches their collective eyes which might interest our readers.
 

Fall into the Donut County hole.

Donut County is a game about a raccoon who controls a hole, and then makes things fall into that hole. It is the best game of 2018.

It’s not a particularly long game – beginning to end it takes about two hours – but the experience is a delight from beginning to end. In the process of moving your hole around, you encounter fun puzzles and silly characters. The game has a bright and cheery art style that really pops. The writing is great, with characters that paint a picture of an entire life through their goofy interaction.

Plus, making stuff fall into a hole is fun. I finally understand why cats knock things off ledges. It’s satisfying to make your hole grow bigger and bigger, to swallow up stuff that didn’t fit in the hole previously.

At a certain point you get a catapult, which can launch things out of the hole, leading to more possibilities for fun.

The game’s brevity is really its only flaw, and that is forgivable since it was made by a tiny team – most of the work was done by one guy, Ben Esposito, who worked on the project for over five years, mostly in his spare time while working for another developer.

To be honest, being the work of one guy is the biggest problem of the game, because one person can only do so much. This simple premise could easily sustain a much larger game, especially as Esposito adds more wrinkles to the formula, but there’s only so much one person can do, so you get a brief experience. But then, when the entire game is great, does it matter that there isn’t a lot of it there?

Donut County is available on PC, PS4 and Apple’s mobile devices.
— Devin Wilger
 

Story in stones

Sometimes a person gets off the beaten path and discovers something intriguing.

No, I am not talking about a Sunday drive in the country, but rather an electronic meander on the Internet.

Recently a ‘cyberbud’ from England posted a video of a gal lifting a pair of huge rocks.

It turned out the effort by Leigh Holland-Keen was only the second time in history a woman had lifted what are known as ‘The Dinnie Stones’.

The stones are named after Donald Dinnie who in 1860, “undertook a feat of strength that was to give birth to a long-lasting legacy. He carried two granite boulders with a combined weight of 733 pounds (332 kg), now known as the Dinnie Stones, for a distance of more than 17 feet (5.2 m), across the width of the Potarch Bridge,” details Wikipedia.

With that tidbit of information I ended up at www.oldmanofthestones.com a site dedicated to the so-called lifting stones of Scotland of which there are a number.

The website is dedicated to the memory of Peter Martin who passed away suddenly, at home, in September 2015. His research in to Gaelic strength culture and traditional stone lifting provides a basis for the site. That there are stones in fields with a long history where people show up to lift purely for the challenge is something I found intriguing. The idea is not unique to Scotland/Britain, a similar culture exists in Iceland too apparently, which had me thinking. While the story/history might not exist with a particular stone here in Canada, there is no reason such a stone lifting culture could not be created with the history created moving forward. My mind thought immediately about the stone buildings of Orkney.

Is there a large stone in the bush around the school which could be a first lifting stone for the area? And what about one near Stornoway, a Community founded in the late 1890s by Robert MacKay of Stornoway, Scotland, so the connection to the roots of lifting are already there? The Town of Saltcoats has its own tartan so its roots are certainly Scottish, and the regional park would be the ideal locale for a lifting stone to promote. Wales has its lifting stones traditions too, and nearby Bangor was settled in 1902 by descendants of Welsh families who had migrated to Patagonia in 1860, and the community was named after Bangor in Wales. Could that be the home of another local lifting stone? Foam Lake, Elfros, and Kuroki all have ties to Iceland which could fit into a regional effort around the idea of lifting stones. And we have those into lifting already, with the likes of Gage Bush and Carter Balaberda winning provincial, national and international events over the years. Whether lifting stones become a local tourist draw, or not, the web wandering on the subject was fun.  

 — Calvin Daniels