Four Things Overheard At A Left 4 Dead Wedding

Wedding cake, over here!
Ring-exchanging!
You may vomit on the bride
You have startled the mother-in-law!

Four Cocktails Named For Left 4 Dead

The Boomer Bile
The Lazy Smoker
The Flaming Hunter
The Rage Quit

UPDATE: As I said on Twitter, I'd welcome other suggestions/ingredients. I'm thinking Boomer Bile should include absinthe for the green colour and vision impairment.

Twitter

I'm a big fan of Twitter, these days. This isn't the reason, but it could have been.

The Monkey Dies

A snappy shorthand for commercial reality is recorded in the often-interesting, occasionally-wrong blog of Keith Boesky: why publishers don't want film licences, particularly King Kong.

"This is exactly the kind of things you said you are looking for. You have two and a half years until the release of the film, the budget is fixed and large and the promotion will be huge."

"Doesn't sound like us. We need big franchises."

"What's bigger than Kong with the director coming off Lord of the Rings?"

"Something with a fixed release 2 years out, guaranteed marketing budget in excess of USD 80 million and guaranteed sequels."

"Wow, that's a tall order. King Kong is kind of unusual though, is it worth an exception."

"No, can't commit. The monkey dies."

Small wonder that Flash minigames are more de rigueur for marketing purposes at present.

Interview Technique

This made me smile: The Onion's Nathan Rabin points out an old interview in which Amy Heckerling makes the mistake that interviewees should never, ever make:

AH: Did you see the movie?

O: Yes, I did.

AH: Did you like it?

O: [Pauses; makes "don't ask me that question" gesture.] Um... There were parts about it that I liked. There were things I liked about it. [Note: This is a lie. —ed.] And it was short. You know? Really short. Only, like, 83 minutes.

I usually do better in these circumstances, although otherwise I'm a terrible interviewer. I've always known this, and have been reminded this week by other people transcribing interviews I have done pausing occasionally to look at me with quizzical, sad expressions at the nonsense I am putting to the luminaries of the games industry.

Three Stories From 'The Onion' That Came True

• Hershey's Ordered To Pay Obese Americans $135 Billion
• Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades
• Bush: Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over

The final one is the scariest. It's like a bullet-point list of everything Bush has done wrong, written years before it happened.

Low-Budget Remakes of Hollywood Movies Set In The Towns In Which I Grew Up

The Bournemouth Identity
Poole Harbour
The Passion of Christchurch
The Sword in Parkstone
The Sway

Science Is Fun