Dammit, Wikipedia

I can't even remember what I was looking for to start with and I've just wasted three hours.

Three Highly Unsuitable Songs That Came Up On iTunes Party Shuffle While We Were Working Stupid Amounts Of Overtime On The Last Magazine Deadline

We Have All The Time In The World
Suicide Is Painless
Theme from Bergerac

User-created content

A piece that made me laugh in Private Eye last week:

As storms battered Britain at the beginning of last week, presenters on Sky News begged viewers to "help us put together the fullest national picture possible" by sending in their photos of the damage... posters on the Football 365 forum, finding that such pisspoor efforts as a shot of a watering can ("the wind blew it around all night") were being featured...rose to the challenge.

And so:

By 11.30am on Tuesday, despite a solemn promise that “your photo will be checked by moderators before it can be displayed,” the 408 photographs in Sky’s “Wild Weather” gallery included a shot of a young Norman Wisdom dismayed by a car crushed by a tree; footballer Carlos Valderama in flooded New Orleans captioned “it’s windy here in Widnes”; a still from the environmental disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow captioned “Whitley Bay”; a suspicious number of scenes of destruction featureing either teddy bears of the athlete and television presenter Kriss Akabusi; and several shots of fallen trees and flooded streets in which missing toddler Madeline McCann was clearly visible in the background.

In other news, I got a new job and moved to London. It's pretty hardcore but I'm on it.

Time bandits

I really like Paris, somewhat to my surprise. Now I like it more:

A group of intrepid "illegal restorers" set up a secret workshop and lounge in a cavity under the building's famous dome. Under the supervision of group member Jean-Baptiste Viot, a professional clockmaker, they pieced apart and repaired the antique clock that had been left to rust in the building since the 1960s. Only when their clandestine revamp of the elaborate timepiece had been completed did they reveal themselves.

These are the same people who ran the secret underground theatre. More power to their WD-40.

Fame please, Carol

It's not easy being a former Countdown champion. In fact, if I was going to be dramatic, I'd say that Countdown ruined my life. Ever since I won, my life has been a constant, utterly in-vain struggle to ensure that this would not prove to be the defining moment of my life.

The story itself isn't really all that interesting, unfortunately, but I want to take a note of the opening line.

Money well spent

Paul just pointed out that Discovery are buying HowStuffWorks.com, for $250 million. Not having much memory of HowStuffWorks beyond it occasionally surfacing in Google, I visited it and can confirm that it is absolutely worth the money. Just on the front page today:

How Machineguns Work
How Bats Work
How Quantum Suicide Works

All Discovery need to do now is buy up Look Around You to run practical demonstrations.

Know your market

A fine statement on the recent hoo-ha about a church group using Halo 3 to tempt in kids for later reprogramming, care of the NYTimes:

“If you want to connect with young teenage boys and drag them into church, free alcohol and pornographic movies would do it,” said James Tonkowich, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a nonprofit group that assesses denominational policies. “My own take is you can do better than that.”

The unstoppable Heavies

I've been spending too much time playing TF2 recently, despite having loads of work and lots of other really quite significant games I could be playing instead.

An interesting encounter on PC Gamer's server last night: Team LOL, including Richard, decided that they would all play one class per round, resulting in offences composed exclusively of Scouts, Pyros, etc.

It ended predictably: all-Scouts were whittled away on 2Fort by entirely standard tactics, all-Engineers held that factory level for quite a while but fell to massed Spies in their midst, and all-Spies perished almost immediately in an unending whirl of flame. Worryingly, however, all-Heavies and all-Demomen proved almost unstoppable. Could it be that TF2 is susceptible to monoculture?

Zero Punctuation

My current favourite thing on the internet is Ben "Yahtzee" Crowshaw's (I think that's the correct form) Zero Punctuation, a series of animated rants about gaming delivered in a polite British monotone that is slightly reminscent of what I used to do when I got worked up about something back before I was a burnt-out corporate shell but I just got drunk and moaned at people in pubs rather than fashioning associated illustrations that are actually much funnier and thus get signed up by inexplicably but cheeringly not-gone-bust-yet games site The Escapist.

Guess where the title comes from. Anyway, I find it deeply entertaining and everybody should watch it. I post this not because I think you haven't, you being a discerning gaming enthusiast who spends too much time on the internet and all, but because it's really hard to find on The Escapist - presumably in an effort to get you to sign up to their newsletter. So here's the link to all the Zero Punctuation videos on the Escapist.

The first couple are on Yahtzee's site but I in the interests of neatness I reproduce them here. They are funny.

The Darkness demo on PS3


Fable: The Lost Chapters: A retrospective

Carnival of Lockjaw

Cardhouse has posted some choice quotes from a book on fireworks. The factory explosion survivor is a good 'un, but this is my favourite:

"Because of such devices, nearly as many people died celebrating independence – around four thousand over the years -- as actually died fighting in the War of Independence itself. The glorious Fourth became known as the “Bloody Fourth” and, because of the large number of severe infections from burns, the “Carnival of Lockjaw.”

Cri di coeur

There's a status bar at the bottom of the CMS software we use to put the magazine together. Since launch, it has held a brief text message - similar to the "I'll find something to put here" at the bottom of a Facebook page, except this one has spooled through random quotes from the minds of, presumably, our merry band of internal developers.

A new one today: "l'enfer, c'est les autres". They must be getting a lot of support calls.

Why the Halo movie might be trouble

A synopsis of the Halo comic does not sound promising:

The Chief is flying on the ship, then on the ground, in a firefight with Covenant forces. There is no dialog, just shooting and grenades going off. The aliens look particularly gruesome, and the artwork seems very faithful to the look of the games. Master Chief blows open a door to enter a room where he faces down a very large force... The Chief is fighting back a huge force that just keeps coming and coming. Finally, a line of enemies lines up and shoots him all at once, and he falls.

Ah, gaming: source of such rich and emotional narrative. Although in the comic's defence, it is apparently written by Brian Michael Bendis - one of the four comic writers who I could name, and who I like from reading John's copies of Powers.

WTF

Destruction still mutually assured:

"This doomsday apparatus, which became operational in 1984, during the height of the Reagan-era nuclear tensions, is an amazing feat of creative engineering." According to Blair, if Perimetr senses a nuclear explosion in Russian territory and then receives no communication from Moscow, it will assume the incapacity of human leadership in Moscow or elsewhere, and will then grant a single human being deep within the Kosvinsky mountains the authority and capability to launch the entire Soviet nuclear arsenal.

Slate points out that Russia is still sat on a Strangelove-esque Doomsday Device that has never knowingly been deactivated, and is more likely to have recently been re-activated. It's pure Strangelove all the way: a vast base built inside a quartz mountain, training designed to turn men into mindless button-pushers (no word on whether they all had to wear orange overalls), and machinery that could wipe out most life on the planet "semi-automatically". Which suggests we're one blown fuse or crazed nutter away from oblivion.

Not to be outdone in the ridiculous yet utterly terrifying stakes, the US also boasts a "launch on warning" system. Bonus dread comes from GIs talking about the "permissive action". This is the fail-safe that requires two key-holders to activate the machinery, supposedly preventing a crazed general from starting the war in the style of Jack D. Ripper. It doesn't offer the security you might have hoped for:

You just shoot the other guy and "rig up a thing where you tie a string to one end of a spoon," he told me, "and tie the other end to the guy's key. Then you can sit in your chair and twist your key with one hand while you yank on the spoon with the other hand to twist the other key over."

So, not only is the nuclear deterrent still there and likely to go off entirely by accident, but there are bored GIs down there idly working out ways to bypass the security system.

everybody-dies
Originally uploaded by Mr Jonty

I have both dudes and catastrophes

I'm a project manager now, I'm slowly realising. It's not a career choice I'd recommend, but it has its moments. I recognise trace elements of them in the words of Cornelius:

It's a bit like manning a joystick at Cape Canaveral: lovely equipment, men on task, and always the promise that things which go awry are capable of going so awry that the course of a federal program is altered forever.

Note for the unitiated: Cornelius is a resident of Achewood, an online comic invariably described as being beyond description. It's good, though.

Noted for future use in the workplace

someecards.com:

Good Things In Bioshock

(Somewhat to my surprise, this doesn't appear to contain spoilers. So go ahead and read if you haven't finished it, although it'd be a far better use of your time to actually play it.)

Bioshock's hype machine started to get silly a couple of weeks ago. It jumped the shark when culturally bankrupt games sites better known for hosting flamewars about Ghost Recon weaponry started comparing it to Crime and Punishment. It reached critical mass when the fact somebody didn't give it 10/10 got on the Digg front page. And now the backlash has started.

A very heavily qualified, very discreet backlash, mind. I've yet to see anybody outright hate it, and it doesn't seem to be clad in the same neo-imperial clobber as Black and White. But the current vibe, after months of rapturous (ahem) proclamations of Ken Levine as the saviour of modern gaming, is to list all the things that are wrong with it. I agree with quite a few of them, but I'm going to start with what I liked - I worry I'll forget them later.

- The setting is excellent.
- The soundtrack makes it even better.
- It subverts the FPS genre. Not to any end, alas, but full marks for trying.
- It made me feel genuinely bad about things I had done in the game.
- Death was something I worked to avoid, but it was never a setback. As is my habit, I created dozens of savegames. I only used two, and both times I didn't really need to.
- It had a big, stupid boss fight at the end that I completed on the second try. I didn't like it much, but I didn't have to spend hours repeating it and honing my hatred into white-hot fury in the process.
- It's a game world not populated exclusively by Americans.
- It's prompted online debate about determinism, objectivism and the nature of Utopia. Which isn't unheard of, unfortunately, but this time the debaters aren't obviously insane and the inspiration isn't utterly laughable.
- It was a conspiratorial event. In common with a lot of people I know, I wanted to get through it before it was spoiled; we've spent a week discussing the points in the game as I reached them, all the while doing a very careful conversational dance to make sure that you don't reveal something the other party might not know yet. It's been a long-distance co-op, and the conspiracy of we who have finished it among those who haven't has added to the experience: whispered conversations in the corner at a party, late-night MSN conversations, and kitchen chats with my housemates have made it feel more significant as we've been carried along by the Cult of Rapture. It's something I can thank the marketing team for as much as the developers, but I don't care: it was nice, and all too rare, for a game to be a moment for people to share.
- Gags that Graham spots and I don't:


Perhaps the best thing is that it's a reasonably intelligent game that has - if early sales are anything to go by - been a massive success. Please, God, let it outsell generic tat by such a margin that publishers are convinced of the need for this level of craft. And while you're at it, make sure that the inevitable sequel is a spiritual successor rather than a narrative one: Rapture was amazing the first time, but that twist, that final confrontation and those ultimate conclusions all mean it won't stand revisiting.

Suicide bombers are in it for the sex

One of several fascinating statements that will get you in fights at parties, in Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature.

It is the combination of polygyny and the promise of a large harem of virgins in heaven that motivates many young Muslim men to commit suicide bombings. Consistent with this explanation, all studies of suicide bombers indicate that they are significantly younger than not only the Muslim population in general but other (nonsuicidal) members of their own extreme political organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah. And nearly all suicide bombers are single.

Wouldn't want to be answering their phone this week.

Soused at the South Pole

Our main purpose is as caretakers of an expensive American facility, just like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, but with more geopolitical significance and fewer axe murders.

Overdone but nevertheless interesting tale of boozing at the South Pole. I'm intrigued to note that the drink of choice is Bailey's and coffee and there's a vast pit of human faeces just to add a little bit of extra dread to global warming.

Round up the usual suspects

Too often I forget that the entertainment industry is genuinely beyond parody. Behold, Casablanca: The TV Series:

Another series, briefly broadcast on NBC in 1983, starred David Soul as Rick, Ray Liotta as Sacha and Scatman Crothers as a somewhat elderly Sam.

Casablanca popped into my head after playing The Darkness. Which is good, by the way - complete nonsense, wildly inconsistent, and not as good as previous Starbreeze effort Chronicles of Riddick, but it does engage you in the telling of a not uninteresting story. Although it would have done a lot better had it felt the need to actually comment on your sudden sprouting of demonic tentacles, rather than immediately relegating them to the status of slightly disfiguring scar - something that people occasionally comment on but don't see as particularly outlandish.

One of the many touches I did like, however, is the TVs in the game, which have been loaded up with royalty-free footage black-and-white footage: The Man With The Golden Arm, old episodes of Flash Gordon, some terrible rock band I suspect are related to the developers. It's a really small, pointless detail that has no bearing on the plot, but I really like it: it's far more convincing than the hoary aren't-we-funny nonsense in the background of Max Payne (which this reminded me of quite a lot, unfortunately) or Vice City, and it's such a cheap, obvious thing to do I'm surprised nobody else has done it before.

Anyway, Sinatra in black and white reminded me of Casablanca, which I want to watch but can't - I'm pretty sure I threw the VHS tape away when I moved and in any case the VCR is still at work, left over from a photoshoot recreating an awesomely primitive tableau of The Way We Were. Sad story. Richard, always well-stocked with really terrible cultural artifacts, pointed out that Barb Wire is a transparent remake but tragically I don't have that either. I'm reduced to reading the Wikipedia entry, which brings me back once again to little details that make me smile:

The version shown in the Republic of Ireland at the time of release had all references to adultery cut, rendering the plot incomprehensible.

Yup.

From Dylan Tweney: Your Computer Is Training You

Getting even simple things done with a slightly underpowered computer and a bunch of web-based applications means you spend a lot of time waiting. Waiting for TypePad to publish a post, waiting for Gmail to populate the screen with a list of the latest messages, waiting for an image to download so you can start editing it in Photoshop, waiting for Photoshop to launch.

Each of these delays is tiny, maybe on the order of five to twenty seconds, or a minute at the most: Delays which, taken individually, are negligible. But over the course of a day, they accumulate, not literally but psychologically, so you start thinking: What else can I do while I wait for this Ajax-ified web page to load? So you flip to another tab, or jump over to your email program, or respond to someone’s IM.

The result: A five-minute task (writing and publishing a blog post, for instance) gets spread out over half an hour, interleaved with a bunch of other micro tasks, because that five minute task contains half a dozen annoying little delays that you’d rather avoid.

Your computer has trained you to become a task-switcher. It has trained you to spread your attention out across multiple tasks simultaneously, devoting only a little time to each one in turn.

This is a major design flaw in all modern computers, because the computers are designed to provide beautiful, translucent, animated interfaces, not to respond instantaneously to human commands. And, I’m afraid, Web 2.0 style applications are only making it worse.

Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy", played on the theramin

It's a metaphor for life

Interesting tip on How To Interview Rock Bands When They're Both Desperately Hungover And Too Cool To Care About The Interview:

I would always pay attention to the drummer. I practically sat in his lap, and I would roar with laughter at every mild joke that he made, like wah-hah-hah-hah! You know, and I would ask him about his drumming philosophies. They often have one or two.

DEVIL TRICKERY. Just one part of a really quite interesting (if unsurprising) interview.

Electricity

This is amazing: working on electrical lines, by hand, with the aid of helicopters. I love how serene the whole thing is.

Supreme silence

Supreme Court justices: not all pulling their weight.

Justice Clarence Thomas sat through 68 hours of oral arguments in the Supreme Court‘s current term without uttering a word... the last time Thomas asked a question in court was Feb. 22, 2006.

Moments in WoW General Chat

Verbatium: You Legionaire?

Brem: Hello
Brem: old friend

Verbatium: I was once a Legionaire

Brem: i know
Brem: hows your new guild?

Verbatium: Good to be seeing you my friend
Verbatium: Silent

Brem: hehe

Verbatium: We just started it

Brem: how is Djenta?

Verbatium: Good, I think
Verbatium: She's not around much

Brem: where r u going now?

Verbatium: Were dating
Verbatium: I will ask her to marry me, I think soon

Brem: nice

Verbatium: I was heading to here called on map wetlands
Verbatium: Try to see what can be done about my lvl
Verbatium: I have been 22 for the past 3 months

Brem: man u are slow

Verbatium: I didnt play much
Verbatium: No phones or power during the winter
Verbatium: haha

Brem: where r u from

[Your auction of Bolt of Woolen Cloth sold.]

Verbatium: Now summer, Water goes unfreez
Verbatium: Waterpowerplant work again

Brem: hehe, where do u live?

Verbatium: Normalyia we gave Nucleer plant, But was unstabil
[Zatura eyes Verbatim up and down]
Verbatium: Eastern Europe/USSR
[Verbatim eyes Zatura up and down]
[verbatim smiles at Zatura]
Verbatium: Well, I be off then
Verbatium: Seeing you

Brem: who will be the godfather on the wedding

Verbatium: Not know yet
Verbatium: Godfather is when Child is born
Verbatium: Best man, is wedding

Brem: sry for my english!

Verbatium: I do not know if Djenta is expecting

Brem: hehe, i got to see that

Verbatium: WHere you from?

Brem: Serbia

Verbatium: Privetstvuyu!
Verbatium: Poidem Vipyem!

Brem: Zbogom
Brem: prijatelju

Verbatium: Da
Verbatium: haha

Brem: hehe

Fundead

Can't remember if I knew this already, but: some TV shows cling to the laughter of the dead, re-using laughter tracks recorded from studio audiences now at least partially deceased.

a few all-time classic tracks recorded in the late 1950s and early 1960s were never retired, and can still be heard on 'Frasier'

Even more unsettling is the existence of the "laugh machine" and the "laugh men."

Slide 1 of many

I actually had to create my first proper PowerPoint presentations not so long ago. The experience was one of partially committed craftsmanship tinged with the certaint knowledge that this is one of the lowest forms of human expression. But now Indexed gives some hope.

Sing-a-long-a-Shatner

There's so much to like here. Personal favourites:

"...The LP has been critically acclaimed for its unique "pop-driven" style. Its sole cover, a version of Pulp's "Common People" performed with Joe Jackson, has received good notices, often to the surprise of the reviewers."

"On June 9, 2005, Shatner performed a reworked rendition of "My Way" at the presentation of George Lucas's AFI Life Achievement Award, backed by a chorus line of dancers in Imperial Stormtrooper costumes who ultimately picked up Shatner and carried him offstage."

Day of the Jonty

Stefan sent this through, and it was the end of the day so I did it. Much to my surprise, it's not hugely humiliating - I was expecting a marmoset.



EDIT: Gril, slightly worryingly, joins me in Jackaldom. And points out, as I forgot to, that you the reader (if you exist) can modify the result if you think I'm something more suitable for using as a car logo.

Where is my mind

Randomly discovered while researching for my Microsoft trip next week: Frank Black is doing music for GRAW 2. What the hell, people.

[Aside: God, I wish they didn't have music playing over the back of the video. LET THE MAN SPEAK.]

Medical breakthrough

Email:

Dear Jonty,
World Community Grid is pleased to announce that the Help Defeat Cancer (HDC) project is finished.

I thought it'd hold out longer than this, to be honest.

Model of diplomacy

“It’s that same one you get when you’re traveling and you tell people you’re from America, and they’re like, ‘I’m sorry,’” she said. “But it’s like, ‘Hey, I control all the money and all the power, so sorry for you.’”

Depressing times at the model UN, which looks to be remarkably similar to the real UN. The biggest downer amid this crowd of precocious and often despisable adolescents comes from one of the staff:

Eric Kardas, a teaching assistant assigned to the U.S. delegation, explained that America is necessarily the 800-pound gorilla at the model U.N. “The United States needs to command every committee,” he said. “If there’s a weak American delegation, committees fall apart.”

The choice appears to be "America wins" or "Everybody loses". What a hugely positive outlook.

Silent Contemplation

Silent Contemplation
Originally uploaded by Mr Jonty.

Long day in London on Friday. Train at 7, working breakfast at 9, briefing at 10, interview at 12, afternoon spent on the phone and on email trying to chase up stuff that was sufficiently urgent that I couldn't leave it for the two hours required to get back to Bath. I went out with Gril & chums in the evening, missed all the trains, and discovered he had a new tenant in his block of flats when we returned. I felt the pose should be recorded.

Coursework

Helping my sister with an essay.

Debbie says:
the other bit i really hate is 'whilst Fowles can afford to take more liberties with criticising society in the twentieth century as the modern reader is encouraged to embrace multiculturalism and differing religious ideas

Debbie says:
originally i just said we're all secular humanists and christianity was dead

Jonty says:
Haha.

Debbie says:
apparently i have to be more 'subtle'

Pretty

nature_HIV_small2
Originally uploaded by Mr Jonty.

An atomic-level picture of a key portion of an HIV surface protein as it looks when bound to an infection-fighting antibody. Unlike much of the constantly mutating virus, this protein component is stable and—more importantly, say the researchers—appears vulnerable to attack from this specific antibody, known as b12, that can broadly neutralize HIV.

More here.

Youthful enterprise

Because I've been working on a launch for the last year or so, I - and the rest of the team - haven't had much contact with readers, for the good and sufficient reason we didn't have any beyond the focus groups. Now, the magazine is on the shelves - with our Live Messenger addresses in it. And so it begins.

Humans Are Awesome

I discovered, by means of Ben Goldacre's extensive deconstruction of Gillian McKeith, the meaning of the term "cargo cult" - expanded by Wikipedia, naturally. And then that leads to this beautifully understated entry.

I'm highly sceptical of the cited source but I think I can just let it go and cherish the moment.

Sweatting it

One of the many Microsoft blogs I subscribe to is credited to M3 Sweatt. I had assumed this was another one of those hilarious programming jokes. If this is a subcategory of humour you're unfamiliar with, hold your sides closed and gaze upon this comedy gold courtesy of The Daily WTF:

my $send_button =
( !$rAuth->permits(SEND)
? ''
: $status != 1
? '' #'[Mailing must be unlocked to send now]'
: $approved
? $send_now
? '' #'[Mailing in Progress]'
: qq(

type="image"
name="send"
src="$::root/sendit.png"
alt="Send"
border="0"
class="form-align"
>

type="hidden"
name="state"
value="$sh"
>

)
: $send_now
? '' #'[Cancelling]'
: '' #'[Approval Required]' )
);

Soaked my keyboard in tears of laughter, that one. Anyway, this blog linked to an article today that interviewed the author, and it transpires that his name is actually M3 Sweatt. It's his real name. He doesn't appear to be some form of street-level DJ type, either:



What bemuses me more than anything else is that nowhere does history - well, the internet, which is supplanting history so rapidly we might as well just go with it - record why he would have such a name. It's obviously prime Google bait, so it's very easy to find every last thing he's posted using it, but nowhere does anybody seem to have tapped him on the shoulder and asked him why the hell his first name is a Scrabble piece. Is this some industry 'thing' that nobody talks about? Or is it such a transparent piece of Californian pretention that nobody dares bring it up in case he starts being cool and individual about it?

Want

Featuring:

> integrated neck pillow in the hood
> pull down light shield to cover eyes
> cuff thumb holes
> internal pocket for tickets and passports
> hidden stash pocket with ear plugs
> pit zips to keep you ventilated

Not quite sure about the last one, but it sounds an admirable replacement for my "any old hoody and a laptop bag full of technojunk" mainstay.

More Suitably

Five celebrities who would be really bad choices for narrating in-car GPS systems

• Joe Pasquale
  
• Tim Westwood
  
• Woody Allen
  
• MC Hammer
  
• Sinistar
  
  
  

Five celebrities who would be really great choices for narrating in-car GPS systems, assuming you want to get there very quickly

• Samuel L Jackson
  
• Laurence Fishburne
  
• Vin Diesel
  
• That Guy Who Does The Movie Trailer Narration
  
• Jack Bauer
  

Concept stolen, again, from 5ives.

Incidentally

Another thing about is that it's all about instant . Thus, I can enforce really terrible, mid 1990's newsletter designs on you at will. At will! Ahahaha. Given that most of said newsletters were brimming with bitchy remarks, overuse of exclamation marks and terrifying belief in the self-worth of the author, it's clear they were the forerunner of blogs anyway, so Comic Sans dragged into the third dimension is a development long overdue.

This line of thinking does overlook goth and emo, which as far as I know never flourished in newsletter form. Of course, I suppose the point would be that nobody read it; maybe childhood bedrooms across the globe contain crude WordPerfect creations marked "Distribution: 2. Me and the heartless, uncaring world."

EDIT: Turns out it doesn't do WordArt. Or image hosting to anything other than your own server. Rubbish.

Favourite Auntie

While I'm still blogging for the novelty of this Word interface... going through my RSS feeds after two weeks without broadband (which wasn't that challenging, I have to say. I was waiting for withdrawal symptoms that never came) I come across the news that the BBC plans to put its training resource online.

I do like the BBC (unlike Paul Dacre, it appears) and it's this sort of thing that means I don't begrudge it the licence fee. While I almost never watch television, I come across all sorts of BBC content all over the place, I listen to radio a lot and I'm a huge user of the BBC News website. I think the site justifies a big whack of money all by itself, and I'll cheerfully pay for having witless advertising removed. If they could hurry up and do a radio station completely bereft of DJs – just news and music – then I'll be just about ready to get the tattoo.

I know, this is a standard and uninteresting blog post. Give me time, I'm catching up here.

Oh no, it’s the future

Two more things:

• I'm publishing blog posts from within Word 2007, running on Windows Vista. It's worryingly satisfying.
  
• This is now a house of four bloggers. I worry about what may happen if there is strife over washing up.

Moving story

I knew that this month would be horrible, because we had to finish the magazine, and the website, and the endless array of other bits and pieces involved in a big launch like this. When it's finally all over I'm going to sit down and work out just how many posters, mini-magazines, Powerpoint presentations, web graphics and custom DVD cases we had to create and see how horrifying the resultant pile is. Remarkable we managed to do a magazine as well, really. Anyway, obviously this was the perfect time to move house.

I've harboured a low-level desire to move out of the old place for over a year now, but never mustered the energy – not least because I've spent most of said year in the office. John, however, being a filthy freeloaderlancer, had more time to sit at home all day and really savour the broken lights, non-functional heating, and slowly peeling wallpaper, and as some other types were also looking for new digs a decision was made to move on. I thought about going solo – every move I've made since university has been a steadily decreasing number of cohabitees, so there was a mathematical precedent – but that was expensive and took more time than I had, so I just rolled with the group and we've finished up in a former student house a long way up one of Bath's more cardiac-endangering hills.

The move itself came at about the worst possible time: four days before the final print deadline, when I was already crazed from two weeks of overwork and sleep deprivation. I was working fourteen hour days so hadn't had time to pack anything and John hadn't done much either, and I didn't help matters by drinking heavily on the previous Friday evening in an attempt to unwind after the week. I managed to get up and over the van hire place a mere 45 minutes after the stated start time of 8am, and showed up chez Craig looking like the living dead. Handily, he's already moved about four times in the last twelve months so was able to introduce an air of consummate professionalism while I concentrated on not ending it all by creative use of an IKEA shelving unit.

The next movee was supposed to be Graham, but he wasn't ready either so I just went back and slept for two hours while John packed up. I then had to go to work, which meant there was quite a lot of stuff ready to go when we started moving again at about half-past four. A couple of friends who'd been unwise enough to be spare this weekend showed up mid-day and helped, and we managed to get John, some furniture and half the kitchen over before giving up around 10pm.

Next day the toil continued. My parents arrived expecting to give a hand with the final cleanup to discover the flat still half full of crap and friend busy at Wii Sports. The rest of the day was spent pushing filial relations to breaking point by carrying boxes, scrubbing three years' worth of crap off things and discovering new and exciting stains beneath long-static items of furniture. Graham, meanwhile, got to sit around in his living room, utterly without distraction because his entire life was packed in binbags, getting progressively less helpful text messages from me as it became clear that we were never going to get it all done.

Proceedings were enlivened by a trip to the dump, where we had to spend five minutes explaining that just because my father drives a van he is not in fact engaged in commercial waste disposal – at one point we were assured it would be okay if we emptied the rental van, filled it from Dad's van, then emptied it again – and thanks to truly heroic effort from the family team we managed to get all the big stuff – including Graham - moved in before exhaustion took over in late evening.

That wasn't the end, though. Oh no. The end didn't even come later in the week: my proposed time off got eaten up by doing photoshoots and we had to resort to first delaying the checkout by two hours as we vainly attempted to get carpets looking remotely disease-free, then giving up and hiding stuff in the garage. We overloaded the car so much I had my first crash in ten years of driving, and even once the letting agent had showed up, knocked fifty quid off the deposit for not cleaning the fucking oven lid and checked us out, there were still five boxes, two chairs, an electric radiator and two cars left on the property.

It's now the second weekend after the move: I type surrounded by boxes that I've not had the time to unpack and rubbish I've not had time to dump. I had to bring a washing machine we don't need and don't have the space for, the house is overflowing with unwanted furniture and the garage we were told came with the house turned out to have been sub-let to an enraged pensioner who did not take kindly to me jamming the lock trying to open it. There's still a car left in the old place that I can't even face thinking about, much less moving.

But we do have space, and the broadband is working, sort of, and I've avoided takeaway food all week. There's a Wii with Bomberman and Mario Kart 64 (and some Twilight Princess thing that I have no truck with.) And next week the magazine launches, and the website launches, and it'll all start to settle down. I'm wondering how I'll cope when it does.

A Year In Transit

For nobody's benefit other than my own, really, but for a while 2006 was the Year Of Indifferent Travel Food and DVT Paranoia. I went to the States so much in the first half of the year I was actually getting bored of it, which is a bit of an achievement given that until mid-2005 I'd only been on a couple of planes in my life. Vague ambition for 2007: head East more often.

Air

Trips abroad = 8
Of which
Press trips = 6

Cities Visited = Las Vegas (twice), Seattle (twice), Baltimore, New York, Los Angeles, Edinburgh, Paris, Kiev, London, Chernobyl, Pripyat
of which
Worst = Baltimore
Best = Pripyat

Baltimore was a bit of a dump and we all decided that it wasn't anywhere we'd want to go to again. Pripyat was, um, exactly the same, but it had the fine excuse that it was in a nuclear exclusion zone.

Worst Travel Experience =
Las Vegas - LAX - Heathrow

Best Travel Experience =
London - Seattle, I guess, although that's mostly because of the silver BA Executive Club card I CANNOT KEEP THIS YEAR OH IT BURNS.

Best Airline = British Airways
Airline I Am Never Using Again Even If The Only Alternative Is A Shipping Container = America West

Road

Cars Owned = 6
Accidents = 0 (-100% decrease year-on-year)
Cars Lost = 1
Top Speed = 135-ish
Total Expenditure = £740
Best Buy = 94L Fiat Cinquecento SX.
Worst Buy = 91H BMW 325iSE.
Most Fun = 91H BMW 325iSE

Rail

Best Train Company = Métro de Paris
Worst Train Company = First Great Western

The trouble with Wikipedia

#1
"In the real world it is easy to not direct films. I have attempted to retire from directing films in the alternative universe that is the Wikipedia a number of times, but somebody always overrules me. Every time my Wikipedia entry is corrected, within a day I'm turned into a film director again."

#2
"I have taken some pictures, should it be included in the article? I can add labels for the specific parts."

Dinner dinner dinner dinner dinner dinner dinner SEAWORLDATTENDANT

Scientists have taught dolphins to combine both rhythm and vocalisations to produce music, resulting in an extremely high-pitched, short version of the Batman theme song.

Satire: doomed. Dolphins: taking another squeaking flip towards opposable thumbs.

(Noted by Scary Man Ellis)

I am a bad person for laughing



Related
Later works
Actual detail
The Hindenburg Omen Wikipedia is pretty amazing, really.

So You Want To Be A Games Journalist

I'm playing this very straight as I work for some very straight publications, and my years in games journalism have not been the dazzling multiformat affairs that my co-writers have experienced. It's also based on magazines, because they're what I work on, and it's been done in a hurry because I'm trying to launch one at the moment and that's taking up most of my time. Made very short:

1.Be a good writer
That means knowing how to spell, knowing the rules of grammar, knowing which clichés to avoid and lots of other stuff that boils down to knowing that millions of words have already been written, thousands more will be written about exactly the same subject, and that your words have to stand out from them. If you aren’t a good writer – and this is something you should always be insecure about - then practice, and read other good writers, until you are.

2. Know something about games
I mention this mostly to point out that you don't have to know everything about games, played every Mario game to completion, have a Halo tattoo or whatever. Journalism has always demanded the ability to very quickly become an expert in something. You don't have to have played everything, but you do have to be prepared to do enough research to convincingly plug any gaps in your knowledge before writing.

3. Know about the medium you're writing for, and write for it
Writing for the web is different from writing for magazines; writing for one magazine is different to writing for another. Magazines for twelve-year-old boys will have a very different approach to magazines for thirty-year-old developers. If you only want to write concept reviews explaining how Solid Snake is actually speaking from the perspective of the battered wife, great, but don’t submit them to Good Housekeeping.

4. Have something interesting to say
This is overstating the case, but I believe it to be necessary. There are some, very few, games that are easy to write interestingly about. The majority of games are uninspired genre work. Your function is to write about them and make it interesting.

You might think that all of the above is stating the obvious. I used to, too, until about two years in; the umpteenth conversation or forum post or plaintive email about I Want To Be A Games Writer or Those Bastards Won’t Accept My Illiterate Blog Post About Girls In Gaming. Thus, I want to be very explicit: from my point of view as somebody who employs people to write about games (and all sorts of other stuff) what I want is somebody who's going to produce something literate, interesting, novel, and suitable for whatever I'm putting together. That is not an exclusive group: there's no sinister Illuminati or secret training school, no vital qualification you have to have. Just be good at writing, then politely and professionally inform people that you want to write for them. If they don’t take you up on it, then consider that the samples you provided, or the way in which you provided them, weren’t up to it – and try again.

I know many games writers who started out penning blog posts or forum arguments or articles on massively obscure websites. There’s no magic barometer of quality. There are just people who are good at writing, good at communicating, and those people are always in demand: every editor, everywhere, needs more and better writers, and usually they’re too busy to actively scour every written medium to find them. If you’ve decided that you really want to make a living in this remarkable, underpaid, bizarrely staffed field, then be the best damn writer you can be and draw as much attention to it as possible.

Some final notes:

* To a commissioning editor/employer, a degree in journalism is less useful than proven writing ability.
* Spelling and grammar is important. Sorry.
* A freelance commission specifies a writing style, a word limit, and a deadline. If you can’t meet any of those demands, don’t bother taking it on.
* Being a games journalist is not about “playing games all day.” Text does not occur naturally. Every word in every magazine or website has been written by someone, and if you a junior staff member/freelancer, then that someone is you.
* If a particular pitch is repeatedly rejected, it’s probably terrible.
* If you make regular requests for freelance and are repeatedly rejected, your writing is probably terrible. Get better.
* Don’t become a games journalist expecting to get rich.
* There are, as yet, no old games journalists. Except maybe Stuart.

This was born of an overstuffed MSN conversation with Tim, Kieron, Suki and others, and represents part of a general commitment to bringing Truth To The People. You may read the other epistles here:
Tim | John | Suki | Kieron | Bill | Tom | Log | The Triforce | Richard | Matthew | Stuart

Just because I remembered him

No further comment

And finally

House M.D.’s Life and Death 2. Sadly found too late to distract John from his suffering, although I'm sure I'll find another use for the House Head(TM) soon enough.

The lady with the lump

I should be working right now, but the topic I'm supposed to be addressing isn't very interesting and I thought I'd try and work up my linguistic mojo by offering a director's commentary counterpart to John's Appendicitis adventure. It's mostly to point out, because John's too polite to, that my bedside manner leaves quite a lot to be desired, earning a reaction less akin to sighting the Lady with the Lamp and more like seeing a skinny chap holding a farming implement. Being acutely aware that I have zero medical skills, I tend towards a three-stage response to personal illness:

1. Paracetamol
2. Hospital
3. Death

Historians will note that swapping "paracetamol" for "leeches" reveals this to be a proud medical tradition, and doubtless one that will result in my eventual death from gangrene. Handily John escalated to stage two with some speed, enabling me to actually do something useful and take him to hospital. I missed all but the first, slightly creepy doctor so I can't speak for the attractiveness of subsequent staff, but they were gratifyingly quick at deciding it was something significant. Eventually he was taken away and I was parked under a sign reading DO NOT LEAVE PEOPLE SAT HERE IT'S INTRUSIVE FFS and left to marvel at how much TV oversells the excitement of A&E. It turned out I was sat on the entrance route for the ambulance admissions, but these amounted to two pensioners, one unconsious and the other seemingly alert but utterly unpeterbed by a horrific head wound. John contributed to the lamentable lack of drama by suffering only appendicitis rather than the alien infestation I'd proposed previously, and not even requesting a differential diagnosis.

Once I'd exhausted my magazine and the rack of little cards they give you when being discharged, apparently just to rub in the fact that public healthcare really doesn't do followup treatment very well (Sample content: When recovering from a serious head injury, do not use trampolines. If you suffer extreme pain regardless, stick it out for a couple of days before bothering us) I decided that he could jolly well move on to stage 3 without my help and purposefully strolled out. In the process I discovered once again that a purposeful stride means you can get into absolutely any part of any hospital unchallenged, but it's really hard to do because every corridor is identical and you immediately get lost.

Handily, it turned out this was the right thing to do because I didn't see him for another two days, even on my return visit to drop off essential supplies (DS Lite, Mp3 player and shiv). In conclusion: my system works! Take that, penicillin.

Speaking of which

While we're on the subject of dinosaurs, I can't really do any better as a link title than Tyrannnosaurus Sex. Bonus points for including the phrase "Cloacal Kissers," which I immediately noted as a new band name although further research might well reveal that it's better used as a collective noun for a certain breed of commenters on Digg.

..he said the ancient animals were hampered by what palaeontologists called the 'golden rule': rear-mounting males always had to keep one foot on the ground to avoid crushing their mates. "Their mating had to be done with great delicacy and great precision. It must have been utterly charming to watch, quite unlike our own species... [if dinosaurs] humped like birds, they'd have to have got past that thick, powerful tail; and for that they would need a corkscrew-shaped penis about three metres long.

Oh, for that sort of ice-breaker at parties. One of those bits of research that it doesn't come as much of a surprise that somebody is doing, somewhere, but it never would have occurred to me to consider it. I guess my teen years must really be behind me now.

The way we was

I have a terrible fear that when I'm old and senile my lack of reading in earlier life will catch up with me, and my time spent dwelling on better days will be overwhelmed with crap like this.

Judgement

Judge Floro was dismissed (or "separated") from the bench in Malabon City, a suburb north of Manila, after questions arose about his practices of starting court days with a reading from the Book of Revelations, conducting faith-healing sessions in chambers, and consulting three "mystic dwarves" named Luis, Armand and Angel for advice and predictions of future events.

The intro has a point. If you want justice handed down, who better to do it than someone with lightning teeth, eyes that emit spiritual fires, and hands that heal poor people with hot coconuts?

In other news: I am sad Steve Irwin is dead. I am not surprised Steve Irwin is dead, and I don't think he added much to modern culture, an opinion shared by many others. However, while I didn't want to watch somebody annoying dangerous animals for entertainment, I did like the idea that there was somebody out there actually doing it - there's a charm, however silly, that the David Attenborough voiceover can't match. I raise an enraged reptile to his memory.

Three things

1. Despite the barbed comments of Private Eye, it appears that the police aren't all that familiar with obsolete computers after all. Police investigating the Austrian who kidnapped a child and kept her in his cellar for ten years are having problems with the fact he was using a Commodore 64 that they can't get data off. I'm sure fansites are swamping them with advice even now.

2. A shot of Google hits from around the world over a single day. Obviously, this is watching the internet's heart beating.

3. Talk to the hand.

The write thing

For the first time in my life, I find myself looking forward to a Will Ferrell movie. In fact, probably two. The former I can partially blame on the fact that it uses the piano-y bit from Spoon's The Way We Get By, which I totally was going to use in a film trailer of my own one day, somehow, because it's that perfect combination of no lyrics and jaunty melody that should be overlaid over a montage of people pulling agonised expressions. Alas, Hollywood beats me to it. Again. The second one I'm assured is actually much cleverer than it looks, something I find remarkably believable.

Sticking to the cinematic theme, I can recommend Crank to anybody who likes the trailer, because it's blessed with that knuckle-dragging high-concept simplicity that means the trailer tells you everything you need to know about it, including leading you to accurately guess the few events that it doesn't actively spoil. Oh, and the protagonist's name is Chev Chelios: you can't really get a much more primal signposting short of marking your territory with urine.

Original No More

For a service that's supposed to foster creativity, Threadless has some achingly uniform submissions. May I be the first to propose a ban, however temporary, of the following topics:

1. Lovable Robots
2. Swirling Graphical Representation Of How Music Blows Your Mind, Perhaps Not Even Metaphorically, Yeah
3. Hilariously Incongruous Star Wars Character/Setting
4. Strange Vector Art With Distinct Root/Tree Motif
5. Anything With Monkeys In

That last one is from the heart. Sorry, world, but I just don't care about monkeys and genus solidarity be damned.

65% - some nice ideas, but nothing really new

I share what I think is Jim's amused horror at his mind not only inventing games, but then reviewing them. Reminds me of the Onion's reportage on a similar subject. I've not had any gaming dreams for ages, myself, but I can't recall anything beyond hazy remixes of whatever I was playing too much of before retiring: that is, WoW or Jawbreaker.

Woah

The suction above the hole resulted in several helicopter crashes, so all flight above the hole is prohibited now.

A really, really big hole that Aanand found.

That's a rap(ture)

I have been having rapture dreams and I can't believe that this is really it! We are on the edge of eternity!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I. Just. No. NO.

Seeing double

WTF? It's like a rejected first reel of a James Blond script.

Let's just file this under Administrative Overhead

This time instead of just crossing their fingers and hoping the curse would falter, the launch team decided to do something. According to Ash, the ground crew held a ceremony in which a Chumash priest, hired by Lockheed Martin, asked the gods for forgiveness and to remove the curse.

And to think Lockheed Martin get so much criticism for unharmonious business practices.

This your captain speaking. We may experience some turbulence and, explode

As a suitably fitted-out plane prepares to crash down, an altimeter would trigger explosive charges to make one wing break away from the fuselage and kick the one-winged plane into a horizontal spin.

Because airline companies are really keen to install explosives in planes these days. Yup.

Mine too

"We have the shot animated that reveals that Winona is not shooting ping-pong balls from her vagina."

South Park gets better with time.

Five Achievements I Feel Oddly Proud Of, Although I Really Shouldn't

1. Had review quoted on game box
2. Achieved enough miles for British Airways Silver Executive Card
3. Had submission featured in NTK
4. Set up wireless network between three PC's, a Mac and an Xbox 360
5. Rolled a car into lampost and survived unscathed

(Concept stolen from 5ives, which you should visit).

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.