Evolutionary failure

I know I've been very slack updating this thing lately (sorry again, Emma) but I received documentary proof this week from a letter from the Highways Agency. Header: Accident, 20th November. Date: 6th April. Opening line: "We are sorry to hear of your recent accident and hope you are on the way to recovery." I'm surprised they just addressed to me rather than, say, the executors of my estate.

In truth, it wasn't an estate because BMW are too posh for such things; it was a Touring. A new record for eBay purchasing: a lifespan of just over twelve days. It was always a silly purchase, although it did look quite exciting: with black metallic paint, mostly-tasteful alloy wheels and a bonnet spoiler it was a great 80's villain car or hearse for very short gangster, and it was far and away the fastest car I've ever owned.

Unfortunately I got a bit too complacent a bit too quickly, I think, and it met a messy end and a lampost (not in that order) on a roundabout just outside Warminster. It was probably quite dramatic, but I've no recollection of the event: I recall slowing down to join a roundabout, then there's a period of static that ends with me talking to a woman on the side of the road, looking at the car lying on its side in the middle of it. Kudos points: 0. Despite my best efforts I can't remember anything else, which is a shame because I think the "passenger side window, or sunroof?" dilemma isn't something you get to ponder often. I must have been reasonably coherent because I came to clutching my mp3 player and the remains of my glasses.

Despite these theatrics all I got was a lump on my head - dismissed in 30 seconds my a triage nurse in an otherwise spookily deserted A&E which of course kept me waiting anyway, presumably to hit some government target. That I made it there at all was only thanks to the very understanding attentions of Tim and John who were both embarassingly helpful and succesfully rebutted my unsteady claims of good health. Alas, they failed to stop me going into work two days later, despite still having a short-term memory that fell far short of the five-minute mark.

The slightly dubious silver lining is that I was able to give some glowing buyer feedback (albeit in a tense rarely encounter in Seller Ratings) and didn't have to worry about the slightly irregular idle, sticky central locking, and a boot so full of water you could have kept goldfish in it.

Anyway, I lived and the car died, terminated two days later by an alarmingly local scrapyard in Bristol, and I went back to the old smoker I hadn't had the chance to dispose of. Now the threatened bill for the lamp-post has arrived, but it's irritatingly devoid of numbers: I was all set for some little-Englander outrage that a bit of metal and some concrete costs £15,000. Alas, all they want is my insurance details: I just hope they can reclaim the premiums that have been screwed out of me the last four years without putting the tab on the ones yet to come. Fingers crossed.

You Have Got To Be Fucking Kidding Me

The Onion vs. reality.

Parody: doomed.

Babes and sucklings

"I learned that it was sad and that you had to go to someplace and get stuff." And to think they said that Homer was too heavy-duty for the young ones.

Pieces of flair

'Susan Sontag nailed the idea of camp in the 1960s, labeling it as "failed seriousness," but no one has yet put a finger on the failed joviality of the retail age -- and its air of enforced cheer, sentimental prefab and the replication of nostalgia... "I think what it was was that one person had a bunch of crap on their walls and it was successful and everybody followed. Who the hell knows?" he said. "When I go to Chili's, it's not because of the southwestern decor."'

My worst fears are confirmed: there exists a job where you spend your days buying up boot-sale tat to nail to restaurant walls. And they're updating it for Generation Y, too! (via Cardhouse)

In other news, it has been a reasonably busy month. I bought another car, wrote it off, did lots of work and caught up with some friends. Yesterday, I was told to go to Vegas. Stay tuned for the exciting details. Now, I must do some Christmas shopping.

Christmas Fear

Yearly Christmas letters to Christopher Walken. The rest of the site is mightily interesting too; how can you resist The Anguish?

Grinny

At last, a movie about the games industry!

This is, of course, terrible. I only hope that the stereotype they've gone for ("We need an utterly pathetic protaganist, a model of someone old who never grew up. I know! We'll make him over 30 yet working in computer games!") is as obviously ridiculous in its crudity as the rest of the film.

Troubled waters

..studies reveal “a commonly held attitude that romanticizes suicide from the Golden Gate Bridge in such terms as aesthetically pleasing and beautiful, while regarding a Bay Bridge suicide as tacky.”

San Francisco: more sinister than you might think. An insomniac posting because I can't sleep at the moment; not in great health these days, which has contributed to slight depression on the passing of my 26th year. Not a unique concern, I notice. I read something months back about the "mid-20's crisis" or something like that, and I'm starting to embrace the mindset: youth is gone, mortality has achieved that absolute, ever-present certainty that previously you can tune out, and you've got a very foggy view of the road ahead in which the only certainty is that you're really going to have to hustle to become a huge success at anything. All of this overlaid with that odd Generation-whateverwe'resupposedtobe nihilism; knowing it's all going to be shitty and broken but at least there'll be wireless games consoles and boozy weekends in Prague to distract you.

Or maybe I'm giving myself and my generation too much credit; perhaps this is how it's always been. Curse previous generations for confining their innermost insecurities to private diaries or the bottom of bottles, rather than posting dreary self-indulgent mush in the public domain.

"When only one of the cubicles is occupied the system attempts to construct responses using fragments of online gay chat transcripts. When both cubicles are empty it is quite possible sexBot talks dirty to itself."

So glad this got government funding. I wonder if they do a concealed version.

Character defamation

"Mr. Harper, for example, says his Elmo is a foe of Batman and Superman, but in cahoots with Mr. Incredible, SpongeBob SquarePants and at least one of the half-dozen Spider-Men who prowl the street."

I'm quite pleased about this, and not only at the mouldering Marvel image the quote suggests. I only saw Hollywood for the first time a couple of months ago, and Hollywood Boulevard was by far and away the nastiest corner of America I've ever seen - I went into the McDonalds reasonably sure that it was the most sophisticated venue for half a mile, and even then there was an armed policeman permanently stationed inside. The performers were hugely unpleasant too; unpleasant, moth-eaten and supiciously stained velour failing to contain someone who bore not the slightest resemblence to the person they were impersonating. I'm pretty sure I've had nightmares about that sort of thing in the past.

Illiterary Theory

Lord Of The Flies (1955)

“I am obsessed with Survivor, so I thought it would be fun. WRONG!!! It is incredibly boring and disgusting. I was very much disturbed when I found young children killing each other. I think that anyone with a conscience would agree with me.”

Time's top 100 book list, as rated by the common man. Good work by Matthew for the Morning News.

All I Want For The Cretaceous



I like the idea of hundreds of kids writing letters to Darwin. "Dear Charles, this year I have been good and learned to use tools. Now I want to evolve LASER EYES."

Yeah it's just another link


The new squad will divert eight agents, a supervisor and assorted support staff to gather evidence against "manufacturers and purveyors" of pornography -- not the kind exploiting children, but the kind that depicts, and is marketed to, consenting adults.

"I guess this means we've won the war on terror," said one exasperated FBI agent, speaking on the condition of anonymity because poking fun at headquarters is not regarded as career-enhancing. "We must not need any more resources for espionage."

End times. Just you see.

These are the end times

Armed dolphins, trained by the US military to shoot terrorists and pinpoint spies underwater, may be missing in the Gulf of Mexico.

I mean for God's sake. Is there even any room left for science fiction any more?

Cretin Season



Clipart comics: the future. Admittedly that has already been predicted months ago by various technology types, but they say that about all online phenomena so where's the accountability hmm? Anyway, apparently Get Your War On now featured in the Guardian, along with the Perry Bible Fellowship. Good work, the Guardian!

Face off

"The "consent form" says that this surgery is so novel and so many of its risks unknown that doctors don't think informed consent is even possible."

This is great science just for that. But the form is even better:

Your face will be removed and replaced with one from a cadaver, matched for tissue type, age, sex and skin color. Surgery should last 8 to 10 hours; the hospital stay, 10 to 14 days.

Complications could include infections that discolor your new face and require a second transplant or reconstruction with skin grafts. Drugs to prevent rejection will be needed lifelong, and they raise the risk of kidney damage and cancer.

After the transplant you might feel remorse, disappointment, or grief or guilt toward the donor. The clinic will try to shield your identity, but the media likely will discover it.

I think the effort they're putting into thinking about this is even more interesting than the surgery. Great stuff.

In other news: looky, I just posted. I'll be doing this more often, although I'll take care not to say how much more. I keep the obligation much broader that way, you see.

Screw the meek

Angry Irish Person: I’m deeply offended by the depiction of the leprechaun on the cover of your magazine.

Publisher Peter Brafford: I’m sorry. We sort of like it.

Angry Irish Person: What do you think would happen if you put a picture of a black person eating fried chicken on your cover?

Publisher Peter Brafford: That’s a horrible cover idea.

Angry Irish Person: They’d be picketing your office! That’s what would happen!

Publisher Peter Brafford: Are you saying leprechauns are going to picket our office? Because I’d actually pay to see leprechauns picketing our office.

A fine rebuttal of delicacy and sensibility by Seanbaby. Apologies for the delay in posting, I'd say it was because of the workload but I've actually just had two days with no work whatsoever. Alas all I could manage to do was sleep and drive around a bit, trying to retrain myself to be a driver (watch the road, be aware of oncoming hazards) rather than a passenger (watch passers-by, look at things in shop windows, idly recall Terry Pratchett jokes for no explicable reason.) The learning imperative makes itself felt very quickly.

From Middle Earth with love

When the knife bounced off the hidden coat of mail and the man raised a huge real-looking sword over his head, the two would-be muggers fell to their knees, begging: “Have mercy on us, Duncan MacLeod,” mistaking the Tolkien fan for the immortal highlander.

Hard times for the Russian elves. I've been feeling the need to post for a while - work having swallowed my spare time to an unusually comprehensive degree, I've not had the time. I still don't now, really, but I've managed to completely burn out the sense of panic I used to get at an approaching deadline, to have it replaced with a sense of placid inevitability. It's actually quite helpful.

Anyway, now that Kieron's new site has emerged like some fresh W3C-certified butterfly emerging from a cocoon of Blogger templates and outright filth - and linked to me in the process, which I thought was jolly nice - I thought I'd write something. So, er, I sold a car. It's actually quite big news given my previous obsession with such behaviour, and I'd written out a long explaination of why, but it reads like a melodramatic pitch to a Sunday supplement and so I'm not going to post it. Tantalising!

The important thing is that it frees up drive space for another profoundly ill-advised eBay purchase. Oh, I can feel my pulse quicken at the very thought.

Missed Connection

I like you because you read magazines with big words. And you’ve got great booblies. I can live without the first. But the second is non-negotiable. Shallow man, 34. When I say ‘shallow’, I mean, damn. Box no. 08/08

The London Review of Books has good classified advertising.

Blogging from the frontline

Jonty On Tour 2005 says:
Oh oh oh. My Documents is now going to be called....
Jonty On Tour 2005 says:
*drum roll*
Jonty On Tour 2005 says:
Documents.
Tim E says:
FUCK ME
Tim E says:
YOU'RE KIDDING!
Jonty On Tour 2005 says:
It's so exciting watching history being made.

Bills Need Payin'

I find the best things when researching features. And by best, I mean not.

Jonty said:
"What Ina Epiosed Of Shaman Kimng That They Had Jun and Ren Have Sex? Or Jun and Lee Bailong?????? "

Jonty said:
"There was no such episode!!!!!!And Jun with Lee would not be incest as they are not related, but necrophilia!!!"

"Leon: Oh my God! They killed Layla!
Yuri: You bastards!
Kalos: ..."

Charybdis - Goddamn Internet Boy Scouts says:
You don't need to make a living like this.

The most patronising post in the world! I can't think of a better way to portray somebody as a complete arse; perhaps it was written by Chris Morris.

Dead Air

This is pretty, although I think the blue-sky weather really makes it.

It's nothing personal

Er, so what exactly is permitted, then?

Wow

This is brilliant. It turns out creativity in gaming isn't purely being squashed by the distribution model; it's actually being forcibly restricted on a hardware level in next-gen consoles. Plus all sorts of other great stuff. Wish I'd been there.

Sorry, Asimov



I love this graphic. It somehow suggests the centre of the universe lies in Sheffield.

It's All In The Name

I've been fuming over this for a while now, but thanks to my goldfish-like attention span and poor time management, this is the first time I've tried to express it. Here goes.

I am annoyed with - and I'm only going to write this once - New Games Journalism. Understand, I don't have any problem with the end result. All this stuff about experiencing games and emotions and humanity is just beautiful, and it's great that the subject has developed to the point where it can be discussed in terms of how you feel, rather than empty details. Awesome stuff, all of it. But that's not good enough; it's got to be labelled as NGJ now, and the dewy-eyed, standard-bearing descriptions it's been receiving are becoming insufferable.

I've never been entirely comfortable with the term "games journalism" in any case, and NGJ as it stands at the moment is a step beyond into faux-literary pretension. As a defined movement it's both uneccesary and unwittingly demeaning; a validation for any gamer who has spent hours spent playing shitty RPGs and mediocre FPSs and understanding appalling gags like "sword of +4 sarcasm" and lame previews that had to be enthusiastic about games you knew were going to be terrible. It turns out it was all okay! No more little boxes listing the publisher and the maximum number of players; it's a literary movement, worthy of lots of self-important discussion.

This is understandable. It's also bullshit, and I hate it for the same reason that I gave up on literature: there are entire bodies of criticism that are now entirely self-perpetuating, generating huge amounts of books and speeches and arguments - people dedicate their entire lives to arguing nuances in long-dead literature that they can't prove and nobody would have seen if they hadn't invented. Dressing up interesting writing based on games as a "movement" is merely spawning exactly the same thing: a grounding for a load of useless, pointless arguments that don't achieve anything other than jumping-off points for more arguments.

My deepest bile on this subject is reserved for The Videogame Ombudsman - a self-appointed and apparently utterly unqualified site which seems to exist purely to state fatuous media-studies truisms while suggesting that rabid fanboyism may have some basis in fact - but that's focused on "journalism" of a different sort and will be ranted about separately. What I'm cross about NGJ is that it's gathered disparate bits of genuinely interesting writing and is attempting to present itself as boundlessly significant. And it isn't. It's a huge and welcome improvement over feature lists and polygon counts, yes - but that's significant only because they were so crummy. That there now exists excellent prose talking about what takes place in and around games, and doesn't require years before the joypad to understand, is an inevitable consequence of market maturity, not some brave new literary creation.

Let's not forget, the thing that started this - the excellent "Bow, Nigger" - was produced entirely from the mind of always_black as a novel feature for a very small games site. He didn't introduce it as The Brave New Thing, he just threw it out there and let people find it. And they did! And it was discovered, and circulated, and printed, and discussed just about everywhere and that's absolutely right and true. But it was only a breakthrough in games discussion if all you'd ever seen before was witless previews of puzzle games; prior art has existed ever since the first conversation between two people who regarded games seriously enough to talk about them. Now, however, a reverse-engineered, ever-shifting and dissent-spreading concept has been founded in its name, and it's redundant.

NGJ didn't need a name, and it didn't need an oversight committee, and it didn't need to have its fundamental nature endlessly debated - not yet, at least. It just needed people doing it. Now it's a "movement" it's got nowhere to go but up its own arse.

World of goddamn Warcraft

I got promoted last week. This is good. I have not shone in my new role yet, which is bad. I've been a bit tired.

I have been tired for what feels like forever.

It's because I've been playing WoW until 2am, every day, despite knowing full well that it's a bit broken and ultimately, y'know, futile.

Today, I wasn't going to play.

I did anyway, on the condition that I would totally, completely, stop at 11.

I stopped at half past.

And now I'm writing this.

I am really, really hoping that I won't go back and start playing in a minute.

Help.

Hngh

"In other words, the very concept of tolerance - the idea that we should all try to live together in peace and harmony instead of being constantly at war with each other - is now obnoxious to the religious right. Tolerance is a bad thing."

The Revolution Will Be Pixellated

"All in all, the Cossacks/Knights of the Old Republic is one of the most manipulative pieces of software ever devised. It leeches morality of young minds and prepares them to kill their peers to prevent a revolution."

Wow, the author lives in California. What a huge surprise. I suspect a move to China may well be in order as that's the only place with a big enough wall to line all his unwitting enemies up in front of. I wonder what he'd consider a good game to be - A Tale In The Desert, maybe?

Well, how marvellously modern this is. Here I sit, tapping away at my tolerably tiny laptop in a coffee shop in Covent Garden. I've even connected to the internet, spurning the pay-as-you go offering of Cafe Nero in favour of the free connection of the hotel next door. Wonder if they make any money on wireless browsing in here...

Something that I could be even more flash about is the fact that I'm using a Tablet PC. These have attracted much derision as another doomed Microsoft initiative (such as, say Smart Displays) and I have been a mite sceptical myself. Now that I'm using it, however, I am a changed man: it's great. You can drag it round just like a normal laptop, but whenever you want to do the hasty-scribble notepad thing, just flip the screen round and start writing. It's just as easy as taking regular notes, with the advantage that I'm exponentially more likely to actually convert them into usable stuff - I keep all my old notebooks, but only once in a blue moon can I ever be bothered to go through them and find the line of illegible scrawl that holds the relevant bit of info. Here I can just rely on the (admittedly not-perfect) recognition to convert it all, and then I've got my choice of desktop search tool to go through it without having to rely on my increasingly poor memory.

Plus, even this fairly anonymous example impresses the hell out of people. If I had the oh-so-gorgeous HP I'd be surrounded by drooling women, depend upon it. Or prematurely greying hitmen - and let's face it, wouldn't that be just as good? I mean, who wouldn't want to have one as a favour-granting friend...

Anyway, so far so great. The only problem is that I'm only here because I'm two hours early for a meeting that I endured much stress to make it here on time for. On arrival I was rebuffed by a bunch of people in their late thirties boasting haircuts designed for the early twenties, and almost gatecrashed a fundraser for Comic Relief. I then reaffirmed that my mobile phone is indeed absolute shit, only to have it's status retrospectively elevated by the fact that nearly all the phone boxes in Covent Garden don't acually have phones in - and the one that did, had shit in it as well. Which I trod in. I wonder if I sit here long enough, I'll get a few sympathetic squirts of air freshner - of course, there's no grass for about five miles in any direction to wipe it on. Oh cruel, capricious fate.

I choose you, Marie Curie!

"Pokemon is a main switch in the molecular network that leads toward cancer," Dr. Pandolfi added. "If we could turn Pokemon off, it may block this oncogenic circuitry and stall the malignant process."

I can't help but feel that the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center are cruising for a drastic reduction in research funding quite soon. What's next? Renaming MS to DS?

I [heart] the internet

Jon [DIY Performance Exhausts] says:
http://funpic.hu/swf/numanuma.html
botherer says:
See, now *this* makes me squeamish.
Jon [DIY Performance Exhausts] says:
I wish he was *my* friend.
botherer says:
Maybe if you email him he will be. I'd imagine he's not picky.

I'm going to blatantly harvest the traffic that John has sent my way and elaborate: he really does have that effect on computers. I've never seen a BIOS suddenly, spontaneously, decide to reset its boot priority. And I resorted to unplugging the internal speaker after it suddenly jettisoned all the standard warning beeps in favour of a prolonged digital farting noise that I've still yet to fathom.

Parents: KEEP THIS MAN AWAY FROM YOUR CHILDREN'S COMPUTERS.

The extended rant that I subjected to innocents like Tim, John, Neil and Alan has been professionally presented right here. Which is actually sort of bitterly ironic, but still.

This article: Crap. I need to think more about it, but I have formed unpleasant and derogatory opinions on those involved as a prelimary action.
This article: Very interesting. I've only got one paragraph into it, though, and it's told me to go to sleep. So I shall.

I've not heard of this, but it looks very cool: Sin City. I think it might be based on a comic or something.

Charybdis - Oooh, Trillian 3.0 says:
Somewhere, on this shining blue and green marble we call Earth, someone has sat down and decided to create Christmas With The Kranks ham?

The Onion AV Club have done good.

Ooh.

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.