Oh. Great.

Let the truth be known:

25 Years of Christmas No. 1's

1979 Another Brick in the Wall - Pink Floyd
1980 Just Like Starting Over - John Lennon
1981 Don't You Want Me - Human League
1982 Save Your Love For Me - Rene and Renata
1983 Only You - The Flying Pickets
1984 Do They Know It's Christmas - Band Aid
1985 Saving All My Love For You - Witney Houston
1986 Caravan of Love - The Housemartins
1987 Always On My Mind - The Pet Shop Boys
1988 Mistletoe and Wine - Cliff Richard
1989 Do They Know It's Christmas - Band Aid II
1990 Ice Ice Baby - Vanilla Ice
1991 Bohemian Rhapsody / Last Days Of Our Lives - Queen
1992 I Will Always Love You - Whitney Houston
1993 Mr Blobby - Mr Blobby
1994 Stay Another Day - East 17
1995 Earth Song - Michael Jackson
1996 2 become 1 - The Spice Girls
1997 Too Much - The Spice Girls
1998 Goodbye - The Spice Girls
1999 Seasons In the Sun / I have a Dream - Westlife
2000 Can We Fix It? - Bob The Builder
2001 Somethin' Stupid - Robbie Williams and Nicole Kidman
2002 Sound Of The Undergroud - Girls Aloud
2003 Mad World - Michael Andrews / Gary Jules

Three fucking Spice girls songs IN A ROW. And to I think I thought the inevitable death of popular culture was a recent fact.

Unlerelated note: There's nothing like typing out every year of your life to make you realise that you are too damn old gah death is upon me.

Blimey. Penny Arcarde managed to do two decent strips in a row. Back on form now, though.

The Internet Is Great

Skullcrusher Mountain [Feat. Mp3 download]

Welcome to my secret lair on Skullcrusher Mountain
I hope that you've enjoyed your stay so far
I see you've met my assistant Scarface
His appearance is quite disturbing
But I assure you he's harmless enough
He's a sweetheart, calls me master
And he has a way of finding pretty things and bringing them to me

I'm so into you
But I'm way too smart for you
Even my henchmen think I'm crazy
I'm not surprised that you agree
If you could find some way to be
A little bit less afraid of me
You'd see the voices that control me from inside my head
Say I shouldn't kill you yet

I made this half-pony half-monkey monster to please you
But I get the feeling that you don't like it
What's with all the screaming?
You like monkeys, you like ponies
Maybe you don't like monsters so much
Maybe I used too many monkeys
Isn't it enough to know that I ruined a pony making a gift for you?

I'm so into you
But I'm way too smart for you
Even my henchmen think I'm crazy
I'm not surprised that you agree
If you could find some way to be
A little bit less afraid of me
You'd see the voices that control me from inside my head
Say I shouldn't kill you yet

Picture the two of us alone inside my golden submarine
While up above the waves my doomsday squad ignites the atmosphere
And all the fools who live their foolish lives may find it quite explosive
But it won't mean half as much to me if I don't have you here

You know it isn't easy living here on Skullcrusher Mountain
Maybe you could cut me just a little slack
Would it kill you to be civil?
I've been patient, I've been gracious
And this mountain is covered with wolves
Hear them howling, my hungry children
Maybe you should stay and have another drink and think about me and you

I'm so into you
But I'm way too smart for you
Even my henchmen think I'm crazy
I'm not surprised that you agree
If you could find some way to be
A little bit less afraid of me
You'd see the voices that control me from inside my head
Say I shouldn't kill you yet
I shouldn't kill you yet
I shouldn't kill you yet

What worries me is that this is going to sit on my hard drive until I attempt to be all modern and use my PC for a jukebox. Then it'll come on during a party and people will think I am very strange indeed.

Learning Can Be Fun

Sing-a-long-a Science. Top pick: Nucleus I Like The Best. The seque from moody acoustic to chemistry rap is really quite something.

Five Sporting Events I Have Witnessed Live

1. International Rugby League
2. Second-division football
3. Monster truck racing
4. County Fencing
5. County Remote-control car racing

Could it be that time again? Why yes, I think so. Put your hands together and your jaw agape for despair-inducing forum post of the week!

"if they are lieng, and I dont want this to sound gayu for all you queer faggots, but if they are lieng im finding them and cutting there god damn sac off"

Thankyou, Nova-Inside.com! I dare not click on the link and see what this incisive intellect mustered for his other 289 posts, but I'm sure you'll make them public in time.

Happy Whatever

Okay, I can understand how it's possible to dedicate an entire shop to birthdays. They're hard to avoid, often expensive, and regularly addressed in the sort of last-minute rush - at least, they are when I'm responding to them. I can't understand, however, how it's possible that it's possible to fill said shop with shitty, shitty cards and a load of emotionally void, officially-licensed crap barely fit for giving to a disliked co-worker. I can't think of anything more likely to detract from your anniversary enjoyment than the knowledge that your pastel-shade, mawkish card and "comedy" T-shirt clad toy monkey came from such a barren place.

My quest having lead me to the exponentially superior but still disappointing shelves of WH Smith hy are there no funny cards any more? The On-The-Ceiling stuff was funny when it first came out which was oh, five years ago. Now it's tired and old and everybody's seen it, a status that its callow pretenders - poorly-Photoshopped animal photos and unfunny digs at knitwear catalogues - achieved almost immediately. I'm sick and tired of those bloody penguins, too. Can't the designers just admit that once everybody's seen your witticism it's time to get a new one, or are they forbidden by the goons of the Hallmark Cartel?

Science: great. As are the New Scientist headline-writers. I'm increasingly fascinated by what a ridiculous animal the platypus is; Gril contends that it's proof of the existence of God, which has a certain Pratchett-esque appeal...

Tech knowledge: Low, red

I suppose this shouldn't come as any surprise at all, but dear God, the Sims 2 community offers some of the most idiotic technical support information known to humanity. Consider this:

"I see alot of people having issues w gameplay etc. I had the same issues such as VERY slow, choppy, and just poor performance in general. As of last night the game runs perfectly and Id like to share the steps I took to achieve this and hope it helps a few people... The 1st thing I did was went out and bought a ATI AGP Radeon 9200 Video Card... Next I bought a AMD Athlon XP 1800+ CPU. That made a VERY Nice improvement, however I found out my motherboard was clocked at 100Mhz NOT 133Mhz. I set the jumper to 133Mhz and WOW!!! Now my PC133 RAM is clocked properley, and with this new Athlon Chip this game is AWESOME!!"

So you bought a new video card and a new processor, and it magically improved performance! Please stop affecting any level of tech-support knowledge now, please.

See? See?!

One of the reasons why I find software development interesting and nobody else does, ever

"During the run-up to Windows XP Service Pack 2 Beta in December of last year, there was a list of five bugs that the release management team decided were so critical that they were going to slip the beta until those bugs got fixed.

The third bug on the list: Deer Hunter 4 won't run."

I like Mr Chen.

Don't fancy yours much

Well, the pay may be low, but at least I can hold down a brief conversation about my job without saying the word "brand" 35 times.

Oh, great. What an utter waste of precious resources.

Wow. Virtual schizophrenia in Second Life.

Tax dollars at work

You absolute fucker.

(via Cardhouse)

Ace: mentally unstable toy therapy.

Something I feel compelled to note: I contributed to Defective Yeti's Tricks of the Trade piece, and was actually included. As the "auto mechanic", no less. Fame! No doubt inspired by my devastatingly illuminating contribution, he's now turned it into a website and (predictably) a potential book. More power to him, say I. Please do swing by and contribute; I'd add some more but I think it would probably dangerous to start making comments about jobs I still hold in some form.

Well, y'see, it really does look like shit. I am aware of the slavish devotion to style that informs this, but slavish adulation something that looks like a really cheap, crappy, Taiwanese monitor isn't that cool.

The cognitive dissonance is really quite fascinating, though.

It would appear that in America, Nintendos grow on trees.

Metacritic for the masses

New game: blog review revue! Simply install the Google Toolbar, head to your film of choice on the IMDB, and then right-click > Backward Links to see what the internet has to say about it. Naturally, it's all bloggers because they're the only ones who'd bother hot-linking the IMDB.

No need to thank me, I do this for the greater good.

The Onion isn't keeping up

City officials hope the effort will ensure that the rallies are calm and, at the same time, contribute to the economy.

It's late. I'm tired.

Defective Yeti has got it all worked out. I'd put some very safe money on the Shitload Of Nazis getting to the final, because frankly those bastards will never, ever, fall off the list of Handy Movie Bad Guys. Aliens, now - a spot of makeup and a romantic backstory and you've got something Nora Ephron could be persuaded to get involved with...

Highly original

Saw The Bourne Supremacy last night, unusually going on a whim and on my own. I'm quite fond of the original, so I'm pleased to report that the character and the franchise are still interesting and I can't see any reason why there won't be another film. The director, however, should be signing a contract right now to swear that he won't direct it. The camerawork is a largely unbroken stream of nauseating jump cuts between handheld viewpoints, giving a viewing experience akin to falling down a very long flight of randomly-located mid-European stairs while cars explode around you. This has the further negative consequence that the cast become so excited at the rare event of being in front of a fixed camera, they ham it up something rotten - enabling a noticeably weaker script to shine through.

Handily, I wasn't expecting it to be anything other than some solid spy-film nonsense, so it succeeded on most counts. I just hope they send the director back to making pop videos and get somebody who knows a bit about actual cinema to do the next one. Wow, what an authentically snobby internet remark.

And they make such loyal pets

I can't tell you how delighted I am to discover that there exists a store called Lobsters Online. Suddenly the dotcom boom seems more plausible.

Snakebite

Man. Darwinia is going to be a hit in the random-visuals-to-project-on-the-wall-of-crappy-nightclubs stakes, depend upon it. Introversion should pre-empt this and start chasing painfully hip nightclubs to use it instead.

Learn To Read

Red dead. No revolver involved.

I find repeating this phrase enormously entertaining, to the bemusement of all others. Clearly some sort of long-dormant Dr. Seuss appreciation bubbling to the surface.

Unexploded analogy

Nirvana are like Half-life to me. For years I wondered what the bother was, what all the fuss was about, both being before my time. And whilst I have recently bought Valve's magnum opus, I have now experienced supposedly "The most influential rock band ever". Whilst I daren't agree with that, I can simply say something else: "The /greatest/ rock band ever".

Finally, videogames and music journalism are as one. And so effortlessly, too.

Best RPG ever. Any online game in which the Ghost Of The English Language appears and demands you avenge his death gets my vote.

I was privy to this storm too. Except I wasn't sat there with my keyboard ready, oh no - I was in bed, cursing the hours of the previous day spent dozing and the idiot phone call at 2 am which meant I was lying half-awake with a hideous amount of work to do and then the Apocalypse started and I had to pretty much give up on the idea of sleep entirely. Tuesday wasn't much fun.

I was too scared to go out on the balcony and watch, because there's a metal handrail and I live on a hill, but I did get up and take time out from cursing to watch. It really was very impressive.

Last night's Tim-moves-in-Tim-moves-out-Chrissy-moves-in-Chrissy-moves-out-John-moves-in party (a Flatmate Flux Festival, as I've just randomly termed it) went well, I believe. My memories are uncertain as I managed to fall asleep for a large part of it, although everbody gamely kept me involved in proceedings by throwing things at my face and draping bits of paper on my head. I'm reasonably sure a good time was had by all, with the exception of the woman next door who appears to be possessed of the same humanity deficiency as the woman downstairs. I do hope they don't form an alliance. Plenty of booze left this morning, which should help to sooth the pangs of Chrissy's absence.

Today I went for lunch with Dan, after which we sat on a canal bank and I had my umpteenth revelation that perhaps the Real World may have an edge over being slumped in front of a computer. I have since returned, finished reading the not-terribly-good The Drowned World and have discovered around 35,000 people doing unspeakable things on Bittorrent. I've swiftly resolved the question of whether to join them; my conscience remains untroubled, but it's really dragging down my browsing speed.

Something for the weekend

A nice two days down South. I slipped away for a drink on Saturday night only to finish up describing endless circles of the New Forest searching for a free camping spot, during the course of which I discovered that the ebaymobile is tolerably quick off the mark but appalling at going round corners. I keep forgetting to check if the front offside mudflap is still in place; I caught it and a goodly amount of surrounding floorpan area quite hard on a roundabout in Totton. Still not sure if I should keep the car, although everybody does seem to agree that it's "cool". I'd feel happier if it hadn't developed a worrying tappety noise on the way down from Manchester.

Anyway, the New Forest is, it transpires, totally booked for a radius of five miles in each direction, so we gave up and went to Southampton where I drank beer and played Project Gotham 2 until six in the morning. Sunday brought a bit more PGR2, a spot of Family Guy, and some impromptu cricket using a child's bat, a tennis ball, and an elaborate scoring system built around the fact we were playing in an extremely cluttered living room filled with empty beer cans and sports equipment. I hit three sixes, but had to stop before the neighbours complained.

Just another day in the office. I'd have waved if I'd known they were filming.

Gah, I'm bored now. Flatmate is away this weekend, so I'm sat surrounded by laptops processing gibberish and reading nonsense on the internet. Worryingly, the only twoactivities that appeal are risky without being exciting. I'm strongly tempted to go somewhere in my new, uninsured car around a bit so that I can revel in the fact that it's different from my old one. The tragedy comes from the fact that I believe it to be cool, and thus an inner voice is desperately attempting to convince the embittered majority of my soul that the cool will transfer itself to me.

It's not winning at present because frankly, the rest of my inner voices know damn well that a skinny bespectacled man is going to have to try a lot harder than sitting in a 20-year old, slightly piebald BMW with an engine that sounds like one of the pistons is trying to beat its way out. Perhaps this is the source of the other activity that for some reason strikes me as appealing: smoking.

Note to self: Less work. More life.



It's been a slow day. I'm currently benchmarking laptops for a group
test, which has proved to be foolish not only thanks to the amount of
time it will take up, but also for being on battery life. If my thought
processes had made those crucial few extra cycles then I wouldn't have
taken it on or would have done the bulk of it at work; now I'm at the
weekend before the deadline with eight of the fuckers slurping greedily
on my electricity bill. In a flat with 60's-era electrics and buzzing
plug sockets, I might add. Still, they're churning out numbers happily
enough, and there's nothing like five screens counting down minutes and
seconds to really focus the mind on doing something - anything -
different with my free time.

Double Negative

I was going to mention this anyway, given my ongoing fascination
with Bath Chronicle newsboards, but Richard has kindly supplied a photo:



This will, I hope, go some way towards explaining the fact that whenever my walk into work takes me past one of these boards, the theme music to the League of Gentlemen pops into my head.

Low Cost Cruse Missile
Man screwed by government, offers freelance weapons design. Fuck me. (Thanks to Richard for the link)

Coca Cola's Plan: Just Say No - To Drinking Tap Water

God, I hate capitalism. And reverse osmosis? What the fuck is that supposed to mean?

Turbulence

The main entree (eggs) should be at the six o'clock position... the salt should be placed to the right of the pepper. Remember, kids, if you serve 7-up unsolicited then you might as well just help the terrorists into the cabin.

Points of Entry

Among the ideas tossed out were “When you don’t know who your baby’s daddy is” and “When you and your daughter are pregnant at the same time. Now that's a specialist magazine.

Smells like what, now?

I don't really remember being young, much. I remember events, obviously, but never any real sense of energy, potential, emotional turmoil or any of that stuff that's supposed to be such a stand-out. I don't know if it's because it never happened, or whether it was so unpleasant I chose to forget it. Either seems possible.

In other news, Nedroid is really rather charming.

Petite Prix

Christ, how many regional film festivals are there, now? I've just watched a movie trailer that spooled through five different cities within the same Cannes-ripoff logo.

Perhaps that's how exclusivity is maintained; any town with a name too long to comfortably fit in the logo can't have a film festival. Best stick with the groundhog, Punxsutawney.

Dangerous Structure

There are plenty of websites out there dedicated to derelict buildings - I can't be arsed to dredge through boingboing and find them, but rest assured that the internet is never going to want for creepy, abandoned cities that somehow everybody just managed to walk away from. Thing is, vast tracts of the internet are like that too - I keep drifting into what were once thriving communities, and now it's all dead links, expired domain names and only the haunting, robotic presence of Lycos popup windows (themselves facing extinction) and long-dead counter utilities waiting for viewers who never come any more. Weird that the whole edifice can just crumble like that. I wonder if there are still people clinging on to spam-infested mailiing lists and long-dead news sites somewhere, hoping it'll all spring back to life again. Probably would have made a nice story in 1998.

Misc. Sund.

Two points I wish to make, both firmly rooted in the WHYGODWHY area of my brain:

1. Driv3r (Xbox) is really, really bad. Atrocious, in fact. It combines the most infuriating aspects of the first game with a ham-fisted bodgery of GTA3, and offers quite the least fun I believe I've ever had from a driving game. God alone knows what the kiddies who've been sucking up all the hype will think.

2. Oh, just fuck off. Vehicles of this type should only rise from the garages of men with masculinity issues and far too much time on their hands. Mass-producing something so utterly, pointlessly, wasteful is so idiotic I get depressed just thinking about it.

That's all. I might get some sleep now, before getting tonight's work under way.

Primal Scream

He and a small circle of sound effects people, including myself and Richard Anderson, continue the crusade to keep Wilhelm alive. The Whilhelm Scream continues to be heard in new films every year.

Excellent. Now that I've read this I'm convinced I've noticed it before, but I suspect it's probably congnitive dissonance.

Crash Testing: MINI Cooper vs Ford F150




Let's see where your ability to block two parking spaces gets you now. Obvious but nevertheless noteworthy commentary on the rise of the SUV in the New Yorker article linked.

Homer, as referenced in the IMDB. Quality.

Postcards From The Gamer

Ahaha. I am funny.

1. Don't like this new Blogger template. Yet.
2. Links 2003 is way more entertaining than I ever would have expected.
3. EA and XBox Live. Woooo.
4. There is no finer way to build business relationships than getting deeply wasted in another country.
5. That conversation tonight was horrifying and wrong even before we unwittingly involved that poor bastard sat on the adjacent table, who had the terrible misfortune to turn round when he heard the word "circumcision". Readers shouldn't have this kind of power.

Dear World

For the love of God, please shut up about the iPod. It is indeed very pretty, very useful and a wonderful piece of consumer technology but it is also very expensive, largely devoid of real technological innovation, and everybody has got one. There are thousands of bloody digital music players in existence - there is absolutely no need to keep harping on about this one and the sheer weight of idiots giving Apple yet more slavish, witless and largely uninformed free advertising is starting to drive me insane. Yes, it's great, no, it's not exciting, and no I don't want see another bloody article that somehow didn't find room to mention the dozens of other devices on the market in between the exhaustive fellatio of Steve fucking Jobs. HE IS MERELY FLESH AND BLOOD and it is MERELY WHITE PLASTIC. Moses had a space on one of his stone slabs for this sort of behaviour, you know.

Trucker concocts superbug killing cream in his garage Brilliant.

Honesty in Advertising

"If I was a regular reader, I would want the ease of the ads being gone, and the archives in a nice little place right there," Kolb said. "And if they don't, fuck 'em."

One Day, I Will Make My Own Entertaining Content

Until then, I shall merely link to other, more entertaining people instead. And change my Yahoo Messenger status to "innocent"

Bibliomancy

The key here is choosing the right book. I tried it with Hop on Pop and my fortune is apparently "Eat a snack." Eerily accurate, if not precisely earth-shaking. Bad books for bibliomancy include Carrie, Left Behind, and the collected works of Hunter S. Thompson.

Busted

Well, I guess that'll teach me to include links. Goddamn server referrals.

Lullabies For The Uncomprehending

Lullaby
And goodnight
La la blah blah
Blah something
I think this song
Is in German
Eins zwei drei vier funf
Bratwurst

Girls gone wild
Where's the beef?
I've got Pacman fever
Four score and
Seven years
Bingo was his name-oh.

...No, for real
Go to sleep
Or we'll sell you
On E-bay ...

On a more worrying note, there now exists a book that consists of nothing but premium-cut blog entries. I expect it will be bought by bloggers in their thousands who will then point at it's sales success as Irrefutable Proof That Blogging Is The Future Of Media, seemingly in a totally irony-free fashion.

ADD

Damn it. I got all fired up last week about the end of the world and how we're all going to be living in oil-starved anarchy within the next 20 years, and then I do absolutely nothing about it, let it slip out of my mind care of that charming cognitive-dissonance trick I do so well, and now I log on again to bitch about this week's cause celebre: everybody else is in the World of Warcraft beta and I'm not. God, I'm shallow.

Well, that's that then

It would appear that we're all totally fucked. Utterly and completely, grow-your-own veg time. Hooray.

All things in moderation

Best forum moderation ever (I paraphrase):

"I suppose so. Now just fuck off and let me do some work. If you don't stop this petty whinging I'm going to ban you. Permanently. Seriously. And if you don't leave me alone I'm going to come down the phone line and rape your sister."

Oh, it's beautiful.

Just in case he deletes it again:: "Some days I really wonder if the Videogame industry deserves to live or should just curl up in a ball and die, lie ignored for a decade or so and then let someone else have a crack at resurrecting the concept."

Top newsboard headline from the non-more-small town rag that serves the greater Bath area:

"Spa fiasco - everybody blamed"

That should draw a line under everything, then. God bless the press.

"Porneoke" had a good few months, during which Hal Robins memorably performed "Monster Mash" in front of a tape of fornicating dwarfs. What a very strange place San Francisco is. I must visit.

EDIT: Holy shit, this dude did the voices for Half-Life too. That's pretty unexpected.

A very odd obituary

Kieron likes music workblog: "The Commies – and if there were ever a band who really shouldn’t be referred to by a diminution of their name it’s these serious Oxford Ex-student types – dominated the spring, only to make a return as the seasons turned in winter. I ended up distributing it to Jim and Walker towards the close and had the following conversation about Holomovement…

Jim: very good
Kieron: I used to walk listening to that on the walk from my Oldfield Park flat and work.
Kieron: It turned the world into clockwork
Jim: no wonder you were spaceman in the mornings
Kieron: Yeah
Kieron: And on the way back from the pub it did similar tricks.
Kieron: The dark clouds run their fingers along the sky's thighs
Kieron: The amber streetlights stand guard on the roads frontiers.
Kieron: I cross their borders, feeling the car's wakes slide past me.
Jim: that means you are gay"

Finally, some decent repurposed content:

Communists Now Least Threatening Group In U.S.
WASHINGTON, DC—According to a report released Tuesday by the Pentagon, Communists rank last on a list of 238 threats to national security. "Communists may now safely be ignored," Secretary of Defense William Cohen said. "The Red Menace has been surpassed by militia groups, religious extremists, ecoterrorists, cybercriminals, Hollywood producers, and angry drivers." Other groups deemed more threatening than Communists include rap-metal bands (#96), escaped zoo animals (#202), and Belgians (#237).

Heh. Belgians.

State makes with the funny:

"Computer? We used to DREAM of having a computer.

We 'ad an abacus made out of some old knitting needles and grandad's teeth, and our dad would put a bit of blue paper in front of it every twenty minutes and then kill one of us, so's we'd think we 'ad a proper Blue Screen of Death, like."

Some Observations From A Brief Sojurn To The Former Colonies, presented in Chronological Order in the Fashion of the Day

Why in God's name don't they let people check in early? There's nothing to do here apart from drink overpriced coffee and dull-eyed people shuffle around - let me through into the hall of wonders beyond the check-in desk, where there's a few decent shops and some comfortable seating.

You know, I don't want to ever get used to seeing people walking around with submachine guns.

Why are Pret A Manger so cheap? They don't taste cheap. Is it a placebo?

TV tells me there are a million enthralling human-interest stories surrounding me at the moment. I'd settle for seeing someone with amusing luggage.

Why yes, that is my teenage self in the passport photo. Indeed, it is highly amusing. How I laughed through those years of pubescent angst.

Goddam Microsoft have spoiled me for air travel. I want Club World, not World Pauper. Window seat might be nice though.

You know, I wouldn't actually travel if I had a cough like that. Much less sit next to innocent, undiseased people who are then trapped next to the cold, unventilating window.

Okay, I'd really like it if you stopped coughing now.

PUT YOUR HAND OVER YOUR MOUTH, YOU INCONSIDERATE BITCH

Why am I watching Bad Boys II? What defect in my personality prompts me to do these things?

Hah! You stopped coughing! You stopped coughing while watching Love Actually! It's psychosomatic! I knew it! I'll kill you!

This stuff doesn't taste nearly as bad as it's made out to.

Yes, that's it, keep coughing. I hope you bring up a lung, millimetre by agonising weedy, yapping, millimetre.

Terminator 4 is a very bad film. I should write to Hollywood and explain that one spectacular car chase doesn't make up for vapid acting, appalling lazy use of established stereotypes and plots that don't even stick to their own reality.

Tell you what, don't bother landing, just dump the damn thing on the runway and let it skid into the terminal. I'm sure those fillings I'm currently swallowing weren't doing much anyway.

Place of address? Shit. Er... shit... er - oh, hold on, they can't check. 34 Maple Drive, yessir, that's where I'm staying. Heh.

Yay, airport welcome.

God, this looks like Nightmare on Elm Street. Surely there can't be anywhere this wholesome?

Basement rec room. Never thought I'd see th- Jesus, that's an enormous TV.


Well, that spun out a little more than I was expecting. Maybe I'll finish it later.

New spectator sport: the sheer, horrible desperation of the music business. I don't like parasitic posting, but I agree with this so wholeheartedly I feel I must record it.

Tee hee. The Washington Post reviewer must be feeling in a pretty lonely place at the moment - specifically, in the director's family. It's only a shame that most of the reviews require registration to read...

Dead man walking

Well, I know what it looks like now, I suppose. Considerably less momentous than you'd expect, actually, although I'm sure it'll be more significant in retrospect.

I think it's time to confess to some strong feelings I've been grappling with since, oh, last Monday.

I take comfort from knowing that I'm not alone:


EDIT: Ooh dear. What I've seen of PC code was pretty sloppy, but I didn't think they'd actually release it in that state. I hope all that "localisation" we're getting before February includes some serious spanner work backstage.

Also

This having been the first weekend in a long, long time in which I haven't had anything to do, I fell to reading and thinking and other things I've successfully managed to tune out over the last few months. I managed to get quite cross about some pretty well-worn themes - society, capitalism, that sort of stuff, the sort of thing that a thousand university arguments are made of but are obliterated once you've graduated and are consumed by them - and I thought I'd write them down here, mostly as an aid to my increasingly ineffective memory and also to let me think things through. I've discovered I have great difficulty internalising Big Thoughts, with the result that insight either pops out randomly (and rarely, I might add) or far too far after the event to be of any use. Writing them down seems to aid critical analysis, and putting them on the internet offers just enough of a chance of exposure that I'm compelled to think about presentation and understanding.

Anyway. I had a "This is undoubtedly deeply unoriginal, but it's not consciously derivative and I need to get my own thinking going on" post lined up, but now it doesn't seem worth saying. I think, perhaps, that's a bad thing. But at least I'm thinking about it.

Big Robot

You should go here. It's the work of talented people.

Greenlight. I've got to get one.

Picture perfect. Another litigous blow against grammar.

Genesis
Well, it was another fun evening at Yeast Unlimited but, alas, rendered deeply sinister by Kieron and his ever-present notepad. I'm not looking forward to any of it appearing in a comic script soon, but should it come to pass I would like to claim responsibility for the gangsta rap of "Keepin' it Real (Ale)". I'm pretty fucking hip that way. Catch me when I'm thinking clearly and there may be an original comedy-drama serial in it for you...

And of course it's totally organic

Squirrel, box, computer. Gosh, I wish somebody would make an operating system that intuitive.

Here comes the aaaaaargh

Caution: Aim away from face

remember; by pushing shift you're letting the terrorists win.

Pull!

"I'm more worried that they would be trigger hesitant..." Oh, good. I can't tell you how much better that makes me feel, knowing that there are psychological programs in place encouraging people to shoot down airliners.

Slow week

ATI screams and threatens press in pale shadow of Bosnian war

Sounds about right to me. I did go away with the aforementioned T-shirt and a fondness for white beer, so it wasn't a total waste of everybody's time, effort and money or anything.

Epiphany

Things I Once Did Scorn But Now Embrace Or At Least Accept:

Circus training
Shop-bought coffee in takeaway cups
The Microsoft Corporation
Owning more than one pair of shoes
Starbucks
The importance of personal grooming
Owning less than three cars
Allotment gardening
Breakdown cover
Shaving daily
The notion that doing a university degree may not be all that beneficial
Comics
Air travel as tedium

In related news, this really would appear to be long, dark teatime of the soul. I've suddenly realised why I haven't missed television all that much since I became distracted over the course of last year is because most of it is utter, utter shit. I've also rediscovered the curse of being sober with nothing to do: my mind works upon itself. The effect becomes more disturbing and the results more worthless with every time this occurs.

See? Much more of this and I'll have to hit the whisky before the voices overwhelm me and I start writing disturbing letters to minor celebrities, or talking in the third person.

Chrissy: Fred Astaire is like your grandad, but with rhythm
Neil: i think you proved humans can communicate by emoticons alone
Kieron: AintItFatFacedAmericansInTheirBasements

That's pretty much been my day. Pathetic, really.

Theya Culpa

I was all set to rant - in a low-key, self-deprecating and ultimately useless fashion, admittedly - about how Hollywood repeatedly throws its toys out of the pram rather than admit that:

(a) Entertainment has developed to the point where there are plenty of alternatives to watching films, no matter how big the explosions are, and thus movies are inevitably going to perform less well. See also: marketing projections the RIAA won't ever talk about.
(b) Most modern films suck.

However, I can't because they're absolutely right on this one. They're just pissed off because the word gets out straight away. Dammit.

The Verdict Was Mail Fraud

You may remember him from such films as these. I'm still quite scared that films like this are produced in the post-McLure era. I mean, Havana Nights?

This means war

Most pathetic advertising slogan ever:
BF1942: Secret Weapons of World War II
"So secret you don't know they exist - UNTIL YOU'RE DEAD"

So that's where the copywriters went when Dolph Lundgren gave up "acting".

It is my belief that there is a woman outside looking for her cat, which is called Portia. If I am mistaken, then there is a deranged harpy wandering the streets emitting piping ullulations with little regard for people who might, in fact, be trying to sleep.

It would help if I knew which was true, as it would mean I could start working on the defence case now rather than having to wing it when the police arrive.

Shut your mouth

Bring it!

Brave new world

Up until now, I have blindy accepted the mantra that all things metallic silver (or better yet, brushed aluminium) were the pinnacle of human desire. If this happened to be garnished with blue lights, then it becomes so desireable as to be almost fundamentally blasphemous.

However... I looked up from my bed this morning and noted two PC's of differing sizes, both silver with blue lights. The laptop on one of them was also silver with blue lights. Prominent amid the litter on top of the rest of the desk was a USB drive (silver) Mp3 player (silver, blue screen) , two mobile phones (champagne beige/silver, blue illumination) and a Space Pen.

I am surprised to note that this was enormously creepy. It put me in mind of that bit in Superman II when the harriden sister is transformed into a robot - silver things massing around until they overwhelm you. Definitely time for a bit more throw-me-down furniture, methinks - even that smell will be an improvement.

Richard now has a site and everything. It's very good.

Gaze, despair

All hail dong_resin:

I think we should arm gay teenagers.
I'm not sure what that would lead to, exactly, but it seems like a good experiment.

and:

Should I really be blacklisted from someone's home simply because I told them "Sylvia Plath was a better cook"?

OK, that's quite odd. All external sources ignore the last post, yet it appears here. Is it secret, or merely my bodging the Blogger code?

Let's see.

There's the rub

Something weird I feel compelled to record: I started dreaming again. This is all the more notable for the fact I hadn't noticed that I'd stopped. The last two days I've woken up from a series of bizarre setpieces, invariably involving people from work engaged in various implausible activities on the sets of well-known film, accompanied by random items from the pit of my childhood memory, and thought hell, it's ages since that happened. Odd. This revelation arrives with the first week of straight drinking I've had for months, thus suggesting my subconscious mind is alcoholic. Which explains quite a lot.

Also, because I'm unaccustomed to having stuff on the internet that's personally relevant: why Kieron likes dancing. My analysis, alas, runs: "that was good. Let's do it again."

Oh yeah, hi Alec. Hope you had a good time in the States. Shame on you for catching up by looking at this.

Freeman on film

Hmmm. Oddly, I feel I should be overcome with horror at the thought, but I'm not - I think it'd make a great film. They'd have to do extremely well to make it a very good one, which of course they're not - it'll get farmed out to some talentless music-video idiot, will star Jason Biggs as Gordon and will be yet another God-awful exercise in Hollywood failing to understand gaming - but the plot, cheesy though it is, is plenty good enough. Let's not forget, there's the hallowed company of Lara Croft:Tomb Raider, or Resident Evil in the Hollywood annals.

However... both of those films traded heavily on their female stars and raked in a lot of sweaty and acrid-scented cash from immature menfolk. Gordon, bless 'im, isn't exactly a sex symbol, and while the notion of his part being assayed by, say, George Clooney would correct this - and would make it a bloody good film - it's not all that likely, particularly as his post-Solaris career plan is probably headed with NO MORE SCI-FI, SWEET JESUS NO scrawled in blood-red ink. I digress. Anyway, if they (a) avoid casting whatsername from the sequel (a notion I regret even as I type it, as the film won't come out before HL2 and thus my opinion of her will have changed dramatically by them, but, hey, stream of conciousness and all that and actually gosh if that's the case I don't need punctuation ahaha God that's going to annoy me when I read it back again I wonder if I'll actually proof it?) (b) cast someone who can actually act - let's pretend George, or Edward Norton for Gordon, and.... oh, Tommy Lee Jones as the G-man, that'll get some geek cred. Furthermore, they shouldn't neglect (c) having a decent special effects budget. In fact, something akin to Men in Black would go down quite nicely, actually, only with a hefty dose of Alien-style creeping horror.

Actually, yeah. Alien. That's the stuff. Ignore everything I've just written, and think Alien, with a load more weapons, a huge special effects budget, and some properly innovative camera work. Hell, you could even have Lance Henrikssen as Gordon; look at the images (ignoring the airbrushed beauty of the HL2 renders) and there's even a distinct resemblance. Also starring: Tommy Lee Jones as the G-Man, Guy Pierce as Barney, and Christopher Lee, Stan Lee, CliffyB, Derek Smart, Dave McCarthy, Kieron Gillen, Gabe Newell and Simon Byron et al cameoing as Doomed Scientists #64 through #4,603.

Okay, I am quite hung over. But I still think it's doable. If only as a back-page in-joke.

I'm going to go away now.

Good little runner


BERLIN (Reuters) - German customs unwittingly auctioned a car containing 10 kgs (22 lbs) of cocaine, the Customs Investigation Authority (ZFA) in the northern city of Hamburg says.

The Chevrolet estate was originally imported from Mexico and impounded in 1997 after an X-ray revealed it was carrying 54 kgs (120 lbs) of the drug. But that wasn't all. "The software used to scan the car in 1997 was not sophisticated enough to pick up the other 10 kilograms," said Hamburg ZFA spokesman Robert Duetsch on Tuesday. The car sat in storage until being auctioned off last month, whereupon the new owner discovered 11 bags of the white powder stashed in the boot, each weighing around 900 grams.

The man immediately returned to customs with the drugs, which Duetsch said would have had a street value of some 500,000 euros in 1997.

(source)

Brain Food

Woohoo!

Game on

I think I'll spend more time in the games industry. It's fun in there. And I get to hang - if you'll excuse the expression - with implausibly-genitaled members of the clergy.

I'll also be spending more time at home, because the new place is - get this - nice. I no longer have to worry about filth, flatulence, and flatmates wandering around drunk or naked. Well, in truth all of the above are on the cards, but there's off-street parking and a balcony view, so it'll be fine.

Word out

My words go on a game box. I am now special. Or a publicity whore - there's some debate.

The truth is out

Comedy genius. At last, I can cast off this feeble human form and reveal my true, multi-limbed, mandible-bedecked form to you puny, puny earthlings

Related: I now have a column in which I have to be professionally evil. My parents would be so proud, if I hadn't thrown them into that abandoned well for having the nerve to oppose me.