All hail dong_resin:

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

and:

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

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

Let's see.

There's the rub

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

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

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

Freeman on film

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

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

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

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

I'm going to go away now.

Good little runner


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

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

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

(source)

Brain Food

Woohoo!

Game on

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

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

Word out

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

The truth is out

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

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

Flat out

Well, getting the flat-renting ball rolling was surprisingly easy; all I had to do was hand over two hundred quid to a smarmy bloke in a suit, and in return some people in a call centre somewhere will decide whether I'm worthy of paying them money every month. Ah, sweet capitalism. Assuming that comes to pass, I'll be living with Chrissy, who went to university with Alec but has since become very chummy with Kieron and Jim. Gosh, it's like living in a connected future or something.

Next stop: tell current landlord and flatmates that I'm leaving, and find replacement tenant. Neither appeals.

Your opinions are wrong

A number of people who I respect and admire have announced they actually quite like The Matrix Reloaded. I no longer respect or admire these people.

This is the first time that I've ever felt so strongly about a film in the face of such widespread opposition - usually I take the unexciting but well-reasoned view that films have good points and bad points and the whole experience is monstrously subjective anyway so hey, why should I even pass judgement? Though very unexciting in painfully weak-willed liberal kind of way, it's a viewpoint that makes for a fairly non-confrontational post-cinema experience. In this case, though, I am genuinely mystified at how people might think it to be just so damn good. Are they drunk? Delusional? Have they been overcome by the dark powers of marketing? I can't begin to understand why people can spoon down such nauseating quantities of pretentious navel-gazing, even when it is seasoned with a defence-budget special effects bill. Yes, I know the same may be said of the original, but that was shorter and had fewer sneering European stereotypes in it.

I say this with confidence as I watched the original again last night, so I no longer hate the Wachowskis quite as much as previously. I fear the general sequel-despising problem may spring from the fact I produced a mighty work of scholarly analysis on the subject of The Matrix. Well, actually, it was only a dissertation, and a pretty lightweight one at that, but it had long words and footnotes and everything. I'd re-read it to prove my point, but I have a sneaking dread that it will turn out to be vague, inaccurate, riddled with spelling and grammatical errors and quite horrifyingly pretentious. I suppose that would make it actually quite prescient, but that's hardly the right sort of motivation required to send me upstairs to start dredging throught the varied strata of junk I hauled back from university, which in any case would probably open anew the vague idea that some barely-read textbooks and reams of sloppily-constructed attempts at analysis are not, in truth, in any way representative of three years spent well and wisely.

Bang on

From the yeti:

Today I was rummaging around in my spam-filter folder, and came across an email entitled "HERE ARE YOUR GANGBANG PICTURES!!!". But when I opened the email it turned out to be some complete stranger's gangbang pictures instead (!!). Oh boy, what an embarrassing mix up. Anyway, if you recently got my gangbang pictures by mistake, drop me a line so can get this all sorted out. Thanks.

This is by way of being the cheapest, laziest way of waxing funny.

A meme moment

Everything is ace, apparently.

Reload

Well, I've no doubt I'm not the first person to say this (I've been avoiding the reviews) but The Matrix Reloaded is rubbish. Two-and-a-half hours of the filmmakers disappearing up their own arses. If they'd had an even vaguely competent editor they could have excised the excesses of the monstrously tedious and overlong scenes - the dancing one, or the incredibly useless waffling off-the-shelf French baddie being particular low points - and made things both more entertaining and more enigmatic. One of the geeky attractions of the first film was the huge number of cultural references dotted around the place, but half the attraction was their being alluded to rather being made the subject of a really quite tedious five-minute monologue. The "councillor" scenes had a suspiciously strong whiff of The Phantom Menace about them (although I'll concede this is probably unavoidable) and at least three characters could have been ditched without any consequence at all.

Even the fight scenes were too long, for God's sake.

In conclusion: unimpressed. In absolute abstraction it might be a vaguely OK sci-fi ninja flick, but compared to the precision of the first on it's just terrible.

I work in technology, I do

From those nice people at NTK....

Readers with long memories may recall Carl Sagan getting
into a similar tizzy about an internal Apple project that
shared his name - until he threatened to sue. Apple's coders
renamed the project's title to "Butthead Astronomer", which
strangely failed to mollify him.

Tee hee. Since I'm referencing them, I'll also point to Bill Thompson's musings on the nature of the blog, which appear to my hungover state to be much more incisive than the similarly-themed comment by Andrew Orlowski over on The Register. I'm troubled by the possibility that this may be indicative of an ongoing assimilation, but The Register does seem to be drifting into conspiracy-theory territory quite a bit these days.

Errata

Oh yes... seeing as Grill has posted for the first time in quite a while, I shall start mentioning names here (something I've initially avoided, but I thought, well, sod it) and see if he ever notices it. Can't tell him outright, see, as that would ruin the thrill of the chase. Oh, and in the interests of character defamation, he's a complete pussy in the passenger seat as well. I mean, yelling like that - they're both as bad as each other. Hail Richard and Beccy for maintaining a clear head.

Use your powers

X-Men 2, then. S'alright. I can't decide whether the highest compliment I can pay it was that Alec wasn't reduced to a gibbering, catatonic wreck (which I nevertheless got to witness first-hand thanks to his frankly over-the-top reaction to my driving) or whether it actually has merit as film. I'm leaning towards the latter, really - there were some nice ideas, lots of explosions, the acting was over-the-top but hey, they're mutants. With that sort of thing informing the film it's a marvel (ahem) that they made it through without descending into self-parody.

Sod it, this isn't entertaining. I'm going to go away and write something really dull, stop listening to this music, and then come back when there's some wit and sparkle going on. For a witty and entertaining read, why not instead try these folks? Currently on hiatus, but they'll be back and there's invariably something worth seeing.

Look upon my works

Has anything interesting ever been committed to PowerPoint? I suspect that even if someone was attempting to pass on the secret of immortality, the simple act of putting it on a crude, clip-art strewn series of slides would be enough to render any viewers catatonic. Perhaps this is how spies communicate, or something. Ahem.

You had to be there

Well, I find the closing line funny. It's an all-caps vaguely literary chatroom geek thing.

From the often-entertaining bash
Xapz: war soon
Xapz: Maybe tomorrow
Xapz: We've pulled out ambassadors
m0swald: http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/Northeast/03/04/iraq.usa.shirt.reut/index.html
Sh0rty: :\
Sh0rty: stupid americans :|
Sh0rty: canada > all
m0swald: my giant american pee pee would rip your canadian-wang-trained females apart!
Sh0rty: :o
m0swald: I'm american, therefore my wang is gigantic. at least, that's what the media tells me
m0swald: not to mention, I'm TEXAN, so it must be doubly huge
m0swald: I assume it's true, too. because every woman I've shown it to has giggled in terror!
m0swald: IN TERROR