Game Over

Popularity Contests

2010-04-22T03:35:00.000-07:00

Imagine the worst thing that could happen to you. Yes, absolutely right. You are a multi-billionaire with the world almost completely at your feet. You have paid to install your man in the position at the top of the government, and for some reason, the voters think that you shouldn’t get your way after you paid all that money. They think they have a right to pick who they want. Unfathomable, I know.

In the UK right now there is a race on. A race for the top.

It’s election time.

Some brief history. Labour have been in power for a long time. Since 1997. Before that it was the Conservatives, or more colloquially, the tories. I was not even alive the last time the Liberal Democrats were in power.

There are three people in charge of these three parties. Gordon Brown is in charge of the Labour party, the party most likely to fall from power. David Cameron is in charge of the Conservatives, and has for a long time been the front runner in taking pole position. Nick Clegg is in charge of the Liberal Democrats, now poised to do considerably better than they were predicted to.

Now back to our nightmarish society. You are a multi-billionaire media mogul. You own several newspapers in the UK, and a lot of TV channels. You have in the past, judged the political climate, and come up with your winner. You pick David Cameron, as you know Gordon Brown and the Labour party are on the way out. It’s obvious. That leaves two parties left. The Lib Dems have around 16% support on a good sunny day, and the tories pick up around 40% of the vote, way outstripping the Labour party.

You have your winning horse. You back the Tories. You even meet with the Tory top dog and basically tell him that as long as the business climate in the UK remains favorable for you, that he will win with the support pledged by your news outlets. Basically, you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.

Let us not forget that democracy is a far from perfect method. A perfect method would be a meritocracy. Democracy is a popularity contest. It’s the political equivalent version of Miss World. Really. That is what you have signed up for.

A newspaper shouting out that one guy is the good guy and one guy is the bad guy is just a way of manipulating said popularity contest. We call them elections.

This is just the situation we find ourselves in until about a week ago. Everything was running to plan. The public were being fed perfectly good ‘versions’ of the truth. The Tories were in first place, Labour were second and the Lib Dems were taking up the last position.

Then the unthinkable happens. Someone lets the public listen to what they have to say. It’s like someone doesn’t want your carefully laid out plans to succeed. Who would do such a thing!?

A Political debate occurred. A Televised debate. They have been having them in the US for years. Decades. We are still catching up in the UK.

Shamefully, the public watched this ridiculous notion of democracy in action. Then, horror of horrors, they started to have opinions.

This angered ~~Rupert~~ Murdoch our imaginary multi-billionaire, as the public started to like the Liberal Democrat leader much, much more than the guy you wanted in the top spot.

What to do, what to do?

Got it!

Use your prodigious media outlets to attack this Liberal Democrat leader as much as possible. Throw as much muck as you can find and hope desperately that some of it sticks. Maybe that way, some people will believe the crap and lies you are publicizing.

The two best possible outlets you could use are The Sun, ‘Britain’s biggest selling newspaper’ (probably nothing to do with the breasts on the third page) and the Daily Mail, also called the Daily Fail by anyone with a brain.

Lo! Behold! Stand in rapture at your glorious prediction come to life!

The day of the next televised debate, the headline of the Daily Fail is something obscure about the leader of the Lib Dems making Nazi slurs against Britain! Read no further! Make a snap judgement that the Lib Dems are bad! Back the Tories! Subtext your heart out!

Obviously it turned out to be a ‘news scoop’ from 2002. 8 whole years ago, where Nick Clegg said that the UK could not rely on past glories and that to have a better economy than Germany, we would have to pull our socks up, so to speak.

NAZI! NAZI! OBVIOUS NAZI IS OBVIOUS!

The Nazi’s would tell you what to think! They were evil! Completely unlike ~~Rupert Murdoch~~ our imaginary multi-billionaire media tycoon.

What could possibly adorn the front page of The Sun? Perhaps some glowing review of the Lib Dem party leader? Of course not. This is the greatest threat to our imaginary multi-billionaires choice for top man. Sink him!

“Clegg on his face” Do you see what they did there? They used his name to make fun of him. Like this. Rupert the Murderer-is-a-Cock. Do you see what I have done there?

If you read The Sun or The Daily Mail a lot, then the chances are you do not.

Equality

2010-02-02T00:32:00.000-08:00

Why would you want equality amongst your fellow men? Why?

Maybe you are answering this question with your internal monologue. Perhaps it goes something like this, were I to be a part of your imagination.

GAME OVER: Why would you want equality amongst your fellow men?

INTERNAL LOLALOGUE: Because I have a very good set of morals GAME OVER.

GAME OVER: Where didst thou acquire said moral base you sir/lady?

INTERNAL LOLALOGUE: Why I am good natured and benevolent towards all men GAME OVER. Why do you ask?

GAME OVER: It just sounds like you are religious.

INTERNAL LOLALOGUE: I am. Didn't you know that religious people have better moral foundations than others?

GAME OVER: Obviously not.

Yes, that's right people. The Pope, the head of the Catholic church on Earth, has decided that equality must be wrong. Or at least, that it must not be law, as that would force it to hire gay people for senior church positions.

Really?

Really.

In fact, they go so far as to state that "In some respects it actually violates the natural law upon which the equality of all human beings is grounded and by which it is guaranteed."

Now being a being of reason, I must state that there is no 'natural law' upon which the equality of all human beings is grounded. Mother Nature is a bitch. I mean she will kill you off in a second. If there is a natural law of any kind, it is survival of the fittest. Not even the one that is really that good at cardio either. The fittest means the beings that are most able to adapt to change.

Homosexuality is actually very prevalent in nearly all species on earth. So that cannot possibly be the "Natural Law" that the pope is referring to. I mean he really does not like those homosexuals does he? Maybe it is some other natural law that only the worthy and the Godly can know?

If any of you have any insight into this, please send your answers on a postcard to P.O. Box 463

How do they get away with this crap anyway? If a leader of the free world pulled some crap like that, then they would be hounded out of office as if they were an England Football Captain engaged in shagathon in the offices if the Holy See in the Vatican itself!

Slave Labour

2009-09-04T06:08:00.000-07:00

This is the goal of any business.

People seem to forget that businesses exist to make money. That is the only reason they exist. No business exists to make the world a better place. Not a one.

If they did, they would go down quicker than if you told Rush Limbaugh you had donuts for toes.

True there are some organisations that are working to make the world a better place. They are called 'Non-profit Organisations'. They are not businesses, they are organisations.

Businesses exist to make as much money as possible, for as little, or, if possible, no effort. They are there to return money to the investors, or shareholders in a greater amount than they have been lent by those same investors. If you think for one second that your business is different, think again. There is no business the world over that will not get rid of you the moment that you stand in the way of them and their bottom line.

It is entirely possible to actually make money out of nothing. This is possible by exploiting all revenue streams for any given product, idea, strategy etc. If it exists in any form (non-corporeal included), someone can make money out of it.

This is no different in my current profession.

News today reaches me of a 'competition' put forth by the Playstation Network online sector of the Sony Corporation. The competition, seems more like ritual ridicule in the lens glared through by the world than an actual reward.

Allow me to explain.

Sony, or more specifically, the PSN network, has put out a casting call. They want YOU to be in their next 'big thing'. This big thing is a reality TV show that will document all the hopefulls getting together to try and win a contract at the Sony Playstation games testing 'facility' in San Diego as a 'professional' games tester.

Yes you heard it. You too could soon join the exhalted ranks of games testers the world over. You could have a DREAM JOB. as the PR releases have proudly proclaimed.

Allow me to enlighten you as to what it is actually like to test video games for a living.

Imagine the worst game you have ever played.

The worst part of that game.

Only that part of the game.

8 hours a day, five days a week.

Amazingly, people are actually flocking to this comeptition, but I confess, it is not their fault. They are born in America, and no-one really has a choice about where they are born do they?

The competition is available only to those who are aged 21 and over, and who have the ability to work and live legally in the United States.

That's not racism, I'm told. It's Xenophobia.

The best part is, in order to see this train wreck of a program, you actually have to pay.

Yes, you heard it. Not content with acquiring a small number of slaves to do this job for them, and all the wonderful 'buzz' this activity will draw from salivating fanboys who follow without question Sony's every move and debacle, they are after even more money.

For a nominal fee, probably around the £5 mark, you can watch an episode of this 'vehicle', but only if you have already paid the initial £300 for a PS3 to watch it on.

Yes. That is correct. You can only watch this if you have paid a minimum of £300. This program will not be available on the tellyvision. It will not be available in a retail outlet near you. You must go out and buy a PS3 (you already have my condolences), make sure you have an Internet Service Provider, and then pay for, what can only be described as, well crap really. The worst kind of crap. The crap you have paid through your arse for, and then found out that the crap gave you an STD.

As my friend said, "The losers should get QA contracts. The winner should get a job in ANY OTHER INDUSTRY."

I must agree with him too, as QA is not something you aspire to. It is something you fall into accidentally, and then realise that it's been 10 years since you last got laid, and you can recite the theme tune to Marioworld by heart.

Don't do it kids.

False Advertising

2009-08-17T08:10:00.000-07:00

Lies.

That is what flase advertising is really. It is the intentional deception of people or persons with a view to getting them to do something that they would normally not do under those specific circumstances.

Playstation 3 developers are no strangers to this. In fact it seems almost normal that they wheel out some kind of "In-game footage/screenshot" at the E3 press conference that many many months later (indefinately if the Sony Press lads have their way) they are revealed as being nothing more than an 'artists redition'.

What we in the trade would call 'bollocks'. It's a technical term that, so if you don't understand it, then fear not.

Sony and their developers are not the only the only ones guilty of such a thing. The Republican Party of that nation of actual crazies are guilty of such crimes against the common conciousness too. In point of fact, them and their news channel (Weasel? Stoat? Fox? Fox.) have been recently expousing the probelms with 'communist/socialist' medicine. They have been misleading the public on a truly epic scale.

The scaremongering has even reached the point where they are having to return to flogging the same old dead horse. Terrorism. Yes, apparently, the National Health Service of the UK is actually a recruiting tool for terrorism. The NHS may be many things, free, occasionally lethal, breeding ground for MSRA, free, beuracratic, smells like root beer, but it is most certainly not a recruitment ground for terrorism.

It makes no difference about the levels of beuracracy for system of healthcare, terrorism will breed wherever there is a repressive regime, like the nation of actual crazies. They know all about repressive regimes. they have had loads of their own terrorists killing their own people, but for some reason just want to put it all on the Arab/muslim world. They claim to topple them, but really they are just installing their own one.

I say Arab/Muslim, but what I really mean is Muslim. The Christians of the actually crazy nation do not understand the Muslims. This makes them afraid. Afraid enough to dress up a war against them as a search for weapons that never existed. Afraid enough that they need to stay at war just incase the enemies they made when over there (They dispanded the Iraqi army, who then became 'insurgents', just like those insurgents against the British, Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams etc) would dare to do something so stupid as rebel against their puppet government.

False advertising should come with a death penalty attached. What could possibly go wrong?.

Contracts

2009-07-19T11:19:00.000-07:00

As with most things in life, my main gripe lies with those that do not use the gifts they have been given from day one. "What could such a gift entail?" I hear both of you ask? Allow me to expand 'ponst my previous point.

Reasoning.

That miniscule voice in your head that shouts at you to not do stupid things. Yet you ignore it. It's almost as if you actually want to ignore it. I mean Chariman WOW!

Let me give you one such example of stupidity.

You are going to get a new mobile phone. You are very excited. This new piece of technology has a 6 megapickles camera and it has all the bells and whistles that your old piece of 'junk' (I say junk, the technology you choose to discard is actually fathoms ahead of most things in the developing world, but taking that into consideration and still deciding to chuck it would make you an asshole, so you conjecture that not taking that into account at all and deciding to ignore such human tragedy will still make you cool with your mates. Thats what's important after all eh?) did not have. You are, I reiterate, very excited.

You go into the Carphone Warehouse or whatever fancy suits your needs. You are so happy to have this new piece of 'awesome' that you just sign away whatever they ask for.

This is where the lack of reasoning comes into play.

You just signed on the dotted line. You did not read the contract. You are legally bound into something you may or may not have any idea about.

Who does read contracts these days? It's a well known fact that contract makers are contractually bound (by their own obfuscating contracts) to make such things as obfuscating as possible. That means that they are legally obliged, by the terms and conditions of their contract of employment, to make things as confusing as possible to you. Encouraging you to 'just sign on the dotted line' as much as possible. Mobile phone carriers actually make their own employees entrap you through your own neglingence. A negligence that you have subscribed to by allowing such obfuscating terms and conditins to exist for so long in such a form.

"What could possibly go wrong?" I hear my subconcious tell me?

Well allow me to enlighten you.

Things like 'data plans'. Whereby such mobile phone carriers have the ability to charge you for 'services rendered' for allowing your mobile phone to carry data all the way from the world wide web (the clue here is that it is WORLD WIDE) all the way back to your phone, which is presumably, somewhere on the world. The intelligent amongst you will realise that 'data plans' are all bunkem. You do not need a 'data plan', you just need the effing data. There is no 'plan' about it. To recieve data via text message, it costs FOUR TIMES as much as to recieve data from the Hubble telescope.

Yes.

You heard right. Mobile phone carriers are charging you four times as much to recieve a message from a friend in THE SAME TOWN/CITY as you, than what you would pay to recieve data from something ORBITING THIS PLANET.

"Oh but GAME OVER, the signal has to bounce off of a satellite orbiting Earth" I discover you saying. STILL this makes your mobile phone carrier TWICE as greedy as NASA. NASA being a government institution setup in the times before mobile phones and having launched the Hubble in 1990.

USE YOUR REASONING.

1990.

Really? It takes 4 times the cost to transmit a paltry amount of data by any ones recognition (even those in the third world laugh at 10k) than it does to recieve data from a space telescope?

Maybe you are getting what the Anglicised amongst us call 'price gouged'.

You are being taken for a ride.

This should come to no suprise from ur American cousins though. I mean really. You think that 'not reading the terms and conditions' is a bad thing?

America bases it's laws on this very ideal.

Don't read them.

Then sign away.

Really, I kid you not. The Congress (bless their cotton socks) are now being petitioned to *actually read the laws they are about to sign up to*.

Seriously.

The 'leader of the free world' as they adorably call themselves, are actually considering reading the mobile phone contracts that got them into such trouble in the first place.

I pity you guys. I know Obama promised "More open government and more tranparency" and I'm sure that one day, more than likely after his term(s) have ended, that you will have them. But you really need to be reading that data plan for now. You really do.

Angels and... Just Don't

2009-07-07T03:42:00.001-07:00

I am not trying to make this area of the Internet into a movie review site, but unfortunately people keep releasing utter trite dressed as movies. If they stopped, surely we as a race could then use movies to actually educate people in the matters of life, the universe and everything.

I have tried to warn Hollywood but, strangely, only received restraining orders from the studios I attempted to contact. It's almost like they don't want to know. It's the "I can't hear you so there is no problem" defense again.

Hollywood is guilty of using this defense more times than 'duck butter' was mentioned late at night in the Neverland Ranch. It has been used recently in the Pirate Bay trial, where record labels hired lawyers to shut down a site that they said "Allowed users to search for links to torrents for copyrighted material". It's not like there aren't others. The record labels just wanted to go for the flagship site. The one that couldn't afford lawyers as good as theirs. There is, in fact another site, much bigger and more popular than the Pirate Bay that allows this sort of thing.

The chances are you have heard of this site. Before I tell you what it is, bear this in mind. The ability to search for copyrighted material was the only charge the RIAA and MPAA could bring against the Pirate Bay, due, mainly to the fact that Sweden has sane copyright laws. The other site that allows this IS known to you. In fact the chances are, you have been there several times already today. Can you pin it down? Here is a hint.

www.google.com

Yup, that site allows you to search for links to copyrighted material too. But you won't find a lawsuit in the works from the MPAA or the RIAA. Oh no siree, that's not how bullies and sycophants work. But enough of this, onto Angerlols and Demunz. If you have not seen it, then read on for the spoilers so that I can save you two hours of your life. You will thank me for it later.

So, here is what happens. Serial novelist Dan Brown auctions off first novel to highest bidder after success of Da Vinci code. Tom Hanks' career is revived and reprises the role of the Symbologist. The Fonz's friend is brought in to direct the movie, to make it more 'serious'. Ewan MacGregor is brought in as the Pope's Son (not actually an oxymoron strangely) to add the popularity of the recent Star Wars tragedies. All in all, what could possibly go wrong?

Well the possibility that Dan Brown is not actually a scientist in any respect of the word probably should have been addressed. In all seriousness, he has proposed that the Vatican had first dibs on the LHC. Not the Large Hadron Collider that we all know and love, but one that follows this workflow.

LHC + Vatican 'scientists' = Anti-matter... Profit?

Now I'll admit that at the beginning of the film they were speaking French far too fast for me to understand what was going on, but I knew it was the LHC from the buildings they showed at the start. They then repeatedly mentioned the ATLAS and CMS detectors. Something all technologists, I would hope, are familiar with. Dr. Brian Cox certainly is. The Vatican 'scientists' (actually an oxymoron) make anti-matter by colliding protons together, then, well, that part is not explained. The anti-matter just sort of "arrives" in a container. One that is immediately stolen, and used as a bomb threat. Now the fact that this is all rowlocks should not alarm you. It is after all, a Dan Brown novel, made into some semblance of a film. It's the ridiculous inconsistencies throughout the film.

At one point, we are told the anti-matter containment field's batteries will power down after 24 hours, then later on that 'cold reduces battery power'. It makes you wonder why the anti-matter is origionally contained in a room near-bursting with liquid nitrogen valves. Surely that is quite dangerous?

The Vatican 'scientists' have obviously not watched enough movies either, as anyone that has ever watched a violent movie including the use of retinal scanners will be familiar with the age old trick of just removing someone's retina to grant access. The Vatican, amazingly, falls prey to this near-ancient idea.

I want to go on, but time is short, and so is my lunch time.

I will sum it up thusly though.

Ewan MacGregor's the bad guy. He doesn't want "science to have creation" i.e. find the God particle (Higgs Boson). Now despite the fact that Science already has the creation, in a provable, factual not "believe this because I say so" kind of way. He also gives his OK to the project in the first place. He wants it all to happen. It's like not wanting to give your neighbor some apples, then planting an apple tree in your garden, specifically so that the fruit falls into his backyard.

-1/10

Valves

2009-06-08T06:14:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I updaetd this backwards section of the internet, so I thought I would give both you lucky readers a treat and mysteriously update for no apparent reason other than I finally have some spare time on my hands.

So, on to the topic at hand. Valves. Valves are great, and most probably a lost technology upon the youth of today. Valves were used in the creation of televisual units the world over. All TV's contained them, and now we have brushed them aside in the never ending march towards the Normandy beaches of our technological futures. All but some that is.

Some of us embrace the valves. Some of us like Dilinger and Lemon D. Dilinger and Lemon D spent an entire year of their lives dedicated to valves. So much so that the fruit of their labour was even named after valves. They were interested in the valves for their unique properties. Those properties being firmly rooted in the realms of BASS.

Dilinger and Lemon D made the Valve sound system. This is something HUGE. It will only fit into three 7.5 ton lorries. It commands respect.

A little background to the sound system. The terrible two (Dilinger and Lemon D) spent as previously stated, a year finding the right parts, testing them all out, then building first in theory, then in practise, the worlds only drum and bass sound system.

I recently had the opportunity to experience said sound system in the UK. I do not even have the words to describe it. Unfathomable is one of the words I do not have. Amazing is another.

My only problem was getting in. As someone well past their prime, I do not need to show ID on such a regular basis that I carry it around with me, certainly not in the UK anyway. Sweden and their ridiculous alcohol age verification laws are another matter. It was my fault though. It did say "ID Required" on the ticket in really really small letters. I should have seen those. Obviously I got to the queue and discovered that there was no entry without ID, as advertised on the ticket. So, off to the bus garage I went, looking forwards to the next three hours travelling to pick up my passport and get back to the gig.

It was worse than I could possibly have imagined. The valve gig was at the Indigo O2, the kind of place they put acts that are never going to hit the big time, come back to play at the O2 Arena, and see how gipped they were on the changing rooms the first time around. Girls a-frikkin-loud were playing at the O2 Arena, and they had obviously just kicked out the hordes of screaming pre-teens dressed in a menagerie of flashing devil horns and cowboy hats. What suprised me most was the quantity of ladies older than myself that were present.

Perhaps they rely on them to sell the full set of tickets, I mean there can't be THAT many pre-teens that like Girls-a-Loud? Can there? Either way, I was on a bus that was basically made of oestrogen. Oestrogen wheels, oestrogen seats, even oestrogen tailpipe (make of that what you will). All of them, to a man (?) singing despicable trite tunes like some blood-sung chorus of harpies.

An hour. An earth hour I had to endure this girlish nightmare, only to be delivered into an even stranger situation.

I am at Waterloo station, seeking my bus route home. I find it on the map and arrive in time to get the last bus home, Darwin knows how I am going to get back this way. There are two men arguing at the bus stop as I approach them. One is screaming at the other in Polish. The other, is screaming back at the Polish guy, except in Russian. They were both swinging wildly at each other. All the punches were falling half a foot short of thier targets as they were both steadfast in their commitment to not moving an inch despite the extra reach it would give them.

I had to get past them to view map, so walked gingerly round them, ducking blows where appropriate. As I approached the map, one of them turned, eyed me and declared me a "Curva". Now that is not such a nice word. In fact it would not normally be permitted on this blog with the exception that it is not an English word. I gave the man in question a quizzical look, and then he said without a shadow of an accent "Oh I'm terribly sorry, that was very rude of me".

Shocked was not the word, taken aback was two and a half. I perused the state of this youth before me. He must have been no older than 21, and he bore the markings of someone who had been on "Having it Large". There was dried blood pasting the skin below both ears, gravity obviously having been inverted through 90 degrees at some point based solely on the wonderful right angles the blood made. Like dried russet bugger-grips. He also had a slit throat. I kid you not, this mans throat was exposed for all the world to see. Well, the bits inbetween the staples holding it together were. I could see this man's larynx.

NHS job. Or at least it was that or home surgery. We exchanged a few pleasantries and some cigarettes. His girl had left him and he was so upset he tried taking his own life. In the 24 hours since though, he had had a revelation and decided to live out his years profitably, whatever that means.

The bus arrived, I moved the two Easterners about 8 inches nearer towards one another each, and got on it. They did not start trading blows immediately, but I like to think I helped them thrrough a tough spot.

The rest of the return to the gig went entirely without incident. A cab was called and mounted. Ridden and paid for. When I got back to the gig, the line had magically disappeared, proving that given enough time (3 hours), even bouncers can process through 150 people. I arrived, presented my passport on top of my ticket, and they took the ticket and waved me in. No-one looked at my passport. No-one cared that I was obviously over 18 anymore. It was just when there were lots of kids to impress that they wanted to check my ID.

Ridiculous. Ineptitude, many other words can be used to describe the security at the O2 event.

I was searched. I was searched by the only man I think could kill a T2000. Huge was not the word. Wall-like in his stature is doing the man an injustice. He made a very thorough (not as thorough as they would have at an airport or policestation) search of me, and declaring me fit for purpose allowed me entry. At no point whatsoever did he take heed of the opaque white plastic bag that I was carrying. It could have contained guns, knives, nukes, sharpsticks. Any number of Alien busting hardware could have been in there. Fortunately for me it was just some silk and 4 pairs of earplugs.

The rest of the evening also pased without incident. So my closing statement is thusly.

If you ever, EVER, get a chance to see and hear the valve sound system, then do so. It is something you will never forget. The tinitus won't let you.

Wolverwon't

2009-04-03T05:14:00.000-07:00

Don't. Just don't go and see Wolverine.

I was fortunate enough to have recently viewed the highly illegally released work print of the recent Wolverine movie. Now before you shout out to me from the rooftops that you are so fond of that I could not possibly review the movie as it is not finished yet. Rowlocks to you. Also, this is not a movie review. This is a rant.

Let me clarify that the movie was in now way finalised state. CG was missing throughout, with large grey blocks of graphics representing an airplane, and several green screen parts along with wires visible. I can ignore all that.

In fact I actually think the action scenes were really good, even if they were just half finished. It's the plot that I take issue with. Something that won't be changed before May 1st. It's the bastardisation of a series of comic books that I actually liked.

Wolverine is not a great comic book. I don't particularly care for it. Deadpool on the other hand, is perhaps the only good comic book Marvel have ever released. It was on the "To be axed list" for so long that the story writers were pretty much able to get away with murder. Asking Kitty Pride if she likes Street Fighter 2 and then uppercutting her whilst saying "HADOKEN!"? No problem. Going out on dates with Death? Most months. Fighting Wolverine just to figure something out completely unconnected with Wolverine? Why not! Having a Psychologist who has a giant bell for a head? Of course!

Then there was the banter. Deadpool was known as a merc with a mouth. This was a shadow of the truth. This is the man that called the Silver Surfer "Everybodies favourite hood ornament". He even claimed, having just made a huge speech, to have the power to make huge speeches mid-leap. This mutant was sent from the gods of character writers to the comedians of Marvel and they delivered.

He only had one super power. It was the regeneration thing that Wolverine is so famous for. Except his wasn't as quick, and left scarring alot. It was imperfect, like the character himself. When he died, he would spend the time with his woman. Death. That's right, this guy romances Death into the bedroom. There is no other mutant that could do that. Not a one.

Then some idiot got hold of it. Some idiot who just happened to need a bad guy for the new Wolverine Movie. I have attempted to bring his conversational process up from what it actually was, to something that you, the reader, will be able to understand. It has not been dumbed down in any way, in fact it has been "clevered up".

Writer - Daaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh. Neeeeedeee villan.

Marvel Guy - Well here you go buddy, just take any of these guys from the comic books.

Writer - duuuuaaaaaa dum dom dea...

Marvel - Yeah buddy no problem, we got that guy! What did you say his name was again?

Writer - Deaauuuuuurrrrrrrrr per per per deadpool.

Marvel - Deadpool? Never heard of him. Do what you like!

That is pretty much all I have on the transcript in front of me. There is a bit that is smudged, but I have to assume that's the drool from the autistic writers mouth that fell on the page.

I would put SPOILER ALERT at this point, as there is nothing worse than reading something in a film you are yet to watch, like say, someone telling you that Rosebud is the name of his childhood sleigh. YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE. But I won't.

Deadpool, suffice to say was a great comic book character, but when put into the movies, has been literally raped. In the wounds. There are several problems I have with what happened, and they are thus.

1) Powers. In the comics, Deadpool has just the one power. The regeneration. That works. It makes him. In the film, he has ALL the powers. half the film is actually the story of one mans quest to go kill or capture a bunch of mutants, and take some DNA from the dead ones in order to make Deadpool a reality. They basically just chuck a load of mutant power DNA into a blender and Deadpool drinks the cocktail. Retarded at best I'm sure you will agree, but in movie land, this is complicated stuff. That means Deadpool gets ALL the powers. He has regeneration, he has giant adamantium coated samurai swords coming out of his hands, he has teleportation, he has Cyclops' eye blast. Talk about overpowered. It's also like giving Wolverine telekinesis or the power of flight. I mean he just doesn't have it.

2) Talking. In the comic books, Deadpool is actually known and called the "Merc with a mouth". Because he is a mercenary that loves to talk. the clue is in the name. In fact the most shocking panels in Deadpool comics are because he is not speaking. He is funny to boot. As in actual comedy. Like Graham Linhan writes. In the movie, his mouth is sewn shut. How can you get something that wrong?

3) Adamantium. Deadpool never had adamantium put over his skeleton. Never. He has those bone style of skeletons. The ones that people like you or Heath Ledger have. Or had. In the movie, he is being "bonded" right up until the last fight. At least he got to defeat Juma's men like Jack Bauer did.

4) Remote control cars. There are none in either the comics or the movie. But one Col. Striker has somehow managed to stick a remote control in a person (Deadpool for the obvious conclusion inept) and control them using what can only be described as an Apple II from the 1980's. How and Why?

Apart from these points of stupidity, the movie was not particularly bad, the action scenes were very actiony, Captain Picard is in it, the day is saved, kinda, and Gambits New Orleans accent is almost one dimensional, if indeed that's what I actually heard. Maybe it was just a sound artifact.

There was one more thing that irked me though. It was during the scene where Wolverine gets his adamantium skeleton. He dies. He comes back to life. Fair enough, that happens to people who regenerate. It's the bit where he dies though. All the military generals and colonels are gathered around, all waiting to see what will happen, and if it will be a successful experiment. He dies, just after having been coated in indestructible material.

Think about that for a second. A military operation, that, like all military operations, has to be completely deniable. These bright minds of future technology have just made indestructible evidence. Wow. Just WOW. It's a good thing Wolverine came back to life and took the evidence with him, otherwise there would have been a right stink.

If you like the comics, do not go to see Wolverine. You will feel cheated.

If you like indestructible claws and sweaty muscular men, go have yourself a time.

Religions

2009-03-31T03:00:00.000-07:00

The 15 minute post.

I want my lunch, yet I want to update this before then. Then is in 15 minutes. Now 14.

To complete the post in the time necessary, I have decided to take a cheap shot at something everyone seems to either accept and almost ignore, despite the fact that it factors greatly in their lives.

Religions should chuff off and take a bowl of my chode for the journey to snack 'ponst.

I mean really. What the hell (see what i did there?) is their problem? I mean believing in something is all fine and dandy. I mean I completely believe that I shall live forever. If I were to have a rational argument with someone, then the conversation would probably go something like this.

GAME OVER - "I will live forever."

Religous - "Prove it."

GAME OVER - "It cannot be proved, you just have to believe it."

Religous - "You can't just say you have to believe, you have to prove it. Just saying that something is true puts the onus of truth and proof on you to come forwards with said truth and proof."

GAME OVER - "You mean like your religion?"

Religous - "I hate you."

At this point I would normally hand them a ticket and tell them to get in line with all the other Religous persons. I shall not though.

HOWEVER, were I to switch the roles around, the conversation might go a little something like this.

Religous - "I believe I shall live forever in the kingdom of God."

GAME OVER - "Not only are you wrong, but I call upon you to prove your claims."

Religous - "It cannot be proven, you must believe in the power of something that is three things at once, yet one thing the whole time. You must put your faith in Jesus to be saved."

GAME OVER - "So you cannot prove what you are saying, yet you are telling me that it is the truth?"

Religous - "Presactly."

GAME OVER - "I hate you."

Religous - "I will always love you as the Lord Jesus does."

GAME OVER - "If he loves me, then I can let him go, and he will come back? Does he love me enough to accept me into heaven without accepting him as the one true god?"

Religous - "I hate you."

These are ACTUAL FACTUAL conversations that I have encountered by religions. As you see I am mainly going on about Christianity, simply because it is the one I know most about. I have heard talk of people going easy on the Muslims due to the possibility of uprisings. Hmmm... The Crusades anyone? Those Christian guys were straight in there converting the "unbelievers".

The Muslims seem to have equally crazy ideas. I mean women have to wear a sheet like some kind of 1920's minstrel bands' stand in ghost.

STOP WITH THE IDIOCY. You do realise you are killing humanity don't you?

What kind of God sets a time limit to Armageddon? Think about it. If your a Catholic, and you are LITERALLY JUST BORN when the second coming of christ occurs, you are well and truly boned. I mean you could not have been baptised in that small amount of time, nor christened. You would be going STRAIGHT TO HELL. For a decision you did not make.

Way to go oh "loving one".

The fundaMENTALists are the worst though. The ones that think the bible is literally true, and that god put mineral and oil deposits in the ground and put the dinosaur skeletons there to "fool us". Check these guys out. These are transcripts from a fundamentalist websites. Actors have been used to protect the morans.

If Atheists ruled the world

Im 21 seconds over my timelimit.

Italy

2009-03-11T09:47:00.000-07:00

Now lets get something straight here. I do not dislike Italians. I do not dislike Italy. In fact in the last year I have even been there of my own volition. The food was amazing, the weather beautiful, and the company both. What irks me about this leg kicking a football like nation is it's government. In fact it's not even it's government, it's just the people that run said government.

In a few of you this may conjure images of the Cosa Nostra taking meetings with the democratically elected Prime Minister to let him know what his public policy will be looking like for the next few years. In others, images of Italian Gordon Brown's and Tony Blairs, or God forbid, an Italian moran like George Bush, but more Italian obviously, running about talking up the war on terror and taking tea with the Queen of England.

You would most likely all be wrong.

It's this Berlusconi bloke that is the problem. He is what you call a magnate. That is not the kind that you manipulate to make an Etch-a-Sketch drawing. It's the kind that owns alot of stuff. In this case it is newspapers and magazines. He is like the Rupert Murdoch of Italy.

Like Rupert Murdcoh, or children, he really does not like it when people express an opinion of him that differs to his own. If someone straight out calls him 'whack', then he is all like 'Oh no you didn't!'. Cue epic cat fight. You know the record, it's been played so many times before.

Normally, this is fine. I say normally, I mean only in democracies, as those are the only places one person can get away with doing something like that. Rupert Murdoch and Silvio Berlusconi are both from democracies if you needed any more proof, which of course you didn't.

Controlling the news is essential in controlling the minds of the populace. What the unfastened coins brigade call sheeple. Surely enough, as Fox News convinces people that Bill O'Reilly is a serious investigative journalist and skilled debater, after a while the masses become complicit with the forced opinion thrust upon them by the machineries of a man who controls at least half of all the media in the country.

The worst part is yet to come though. He wants to ban The Internet. Not only is he the (barring the good old Cosa Nostra) most powerful man in Italy, but it seems he is also the most stupid. OK so he doesn't want to ban the Internet, he just wants to make it illegal in some senses. Say this very medium you are reading now.

Blogging. Something that is so distasteful that I can barely force myself to do it more than once a week lest I break down in tears from the sheer force of will I must exert into becoming one of them. It may also just be apathy.

There is a new law in debate in Italy's Parliament. It says that bloggers should register with the government. Basically so that the state can gain control of the last unregulated and truly free medium. All the national papers in Italy take financial backing from the state. Hi Ho Silvio owns half the TV stations, the state owns the other half, with one left to pick up the crumbs.

I, am right now, doing something that in a few short months may be illegal in Italy. Just typing some words into a web browser. That's all. That could be illegal.

What next? Ban certain combinations of words in sentences, so that you can't 'diss The Man'. "The Prime Minister bribed Tessa Jowell's husband", "Hi ho Silvio used to be part of a masonic lodge tasked with reshaping Italian politics toward a more authoritarian regime" and "The Man's TV companies abuse their frequency ranges" may all become illegal. Where does the madness stop?

If you want to regulate blogs and get the bloggers to sign up, as is the plan now, how much money do you think that will cost? I mean these people have come out in their millions now that they just have to turn the box on the desk on to reach the rest of the world. Getting them to register by post will not work with people who only use computers because they are too lazy to buy stamps and use them.

It's going to have to be electronic. Nothing governments ever do on the Internet ever works out.

The Italian government are going to get stung by the series of tubes. They will overestimate their ability to use it, and overestimate bloggers ability to not FUBAR things.

I suppose it's alright really, as the paper work and impracticality of it all, along with unfastened coins, is just immense. Huge. Gigantic. Like Hi Ho Silvio's barrel chest.

Still at least they make fine automobiles.

Freedom FTW!

Fanboys

2009-03-08T12:11:00.001-07:00

There is nothing worse in this world than a fanboy. OK, perhaps a fanboy of Shellshock 2, but nothing else. They are also still a fanboy.

I am a moderator in one of those most vicious of message boards, an Internet forum. Forums are supposed to be for like minded individuals posting things of relevant interest for all the community. They rarely live up to this expectation. Most of the time they are vitriol (one of my personal interests) infested pits of the worst part of the Internet. The part that is not free movies via bit torrent or porn. So about 2% then.

Fanboys, wikipedia would have us believe, are people that are devoted to one single subject in an emotional and fanatical manner. In fact it may be true to say that I am a vitriol fanboy. But let's not.

I have to come into contact with fanboys on a regular basis, and it is not something that I enjoy. OK, that may be a lie. In fact it is a lie. Being a fanboy is fraught with difficulty. It requires a complete devotion and the emu-like ability to completely ignore what everyone else says, and most especially, complete ignorance of facts.

I recently had the displeasure of seeing a fanboy in action on the YouTubes. He was in no short terms, a moran. The video in question, available here, starts off with the neanderthal claiming that not only do Sony do what they do (is it possible for them to NOT do what they do?) but that they also do not advertise. They don't? I beg to differ, in fact, the truth begs to differ also. The user name, ELPRESADOR, possibly all in caps because he can't not shout, seems completely oblivious to fact driven argument. In fact I indulged myself in such an argument with him for the space of one day. I say argument, but that would imply that there was some point of dispute as opposed to what actually happened. He was wrong and I was right.

ELPRESADOR also seems to have two chins in said video. He is a strange one nonetheless. A classic example of neanderthal man with the sloping brow and all. Also, he spends most of that video crying. I think it's supposed to be an impression of someone without a PS3 who can't play Killzone 2, although it could just be the face of a man who has just had the sad realisation dawn upon him that he has been played like a flute by an excellent marketing team. For those of you that do not know what Killzone 2 is, it's a PS3 'exclusive' game that is immensely overhyped and not actually as good it could have been. The render lag is bad enough.

The mark of a man's intellectual ability can be easily measured by the quantity of swear words used in 'comebacks'. These are those verbal ripostes and parries that any such argument flits between. Stephen Fry would never have to use one, as he has the intellect of several men combined. ELPRESADOR however seems to do nothing BUT swear. Any attempt to goad him into the realms of rational argument was greeted with calls of 'faggot' and 'c$%& sucker'. I almost feel sorry for him.

Not only are Sony loosing the console war in a spectacular way, along with Microsoft, but they do not even have the good grace to bow out with some form of dignity intact. It is a pity. It means more fanboys.

Sony also seems to have the most fanatical of the fanboys too. They seem to think that as the PS3 has a Blu-Ray player, that is basically the end of the argument. Why so? I would attempt at this point to formalise some kind of rational argument as to why that meant they had actually been duped into early adoption of something that will not really be very useful for another three years, but why bother? A fanboy would just tell me that I was angry that I had bought an XBOX360. The Sony fanboys believe that anyone that does not love Sony with every quantum of their being, must be a Microsoft fanboy. These are the people that post videos on YouTube using Microsoft windows. Talk about sleeping with the enemy.

In a recent forum post, a fanboy of Sony asked if the PS3 version of a game was going to be better than the 360 version of the game. Obviously the PS3 is superior to the 360 as it just is. No logical reasoning. Another poster said this in response.

"No amount of programming will give the PS3 more memory"

How right they were. A brief search of wikipedia shows that the PS3 actually has half the amount of RAM the 360 does. Sure the PS3 has two different types of RAM that when added up equals the same amount as the 360, but it can't all be used in the same way. I really want to try to explain further, but as fanboys do not regard truth with the same crystal clear goggles as the rest of humanity, why bother? To those who would say that the PS3 has 8 cpu's, and the 360 only 3. I would say yes. But as a maker of games, you are only allowed to use 5 of them, which puts the processing power waaaaaaaay behind those 3 in the 360 that are actually useful.

If you are in any doubt as to which console is better, have a little try out on the controllers. The 360 seems to have springs loaded into the thumbsticks. It offers some resistance. That's exactly what you want if you are going to be playing a FPS game. The Sony controller feels like there is jelly loaded into the thumbsticks.

If there are any fanboys out there that are reading this. GO AWAY. Also, I would like to point out that I do not own a 360 or PS3. They are both equally crap for playing FPS, especially compared to a PC's control method. Or even the Wii for that matter.

Fanboys are also under a complete delusion that console manufacturers have their best interest at heart. They do not. They LOVE money. They are labouring under the misapprehension that they would not lie to them. Killzone 2 is actually a very good example of this. In order to build hype around the game, Sony showed off a video years ago that was meant to be 'in-game footage'. It looked totally sweet. Even I thought it looked totally sweet. It did. That was because it was anything but in-game footage. It was a pre-rendered video, like Toy Story. Sony did not loose a wink of sleep. The fanboys went wild. It was party central for PS3 owners. Then the lie was exposed. The fanboys went into a kind of hibernation. A controlled slumber. They shut their eyes and ears to all negative commentary levelled at the lie. Some of them I'm sure even maintained that the lie was just the liberal media bias, out to get Sony, racist as they were.

What idiots.

If you think for a second that your favourite company would not lie to you to improve their bottom line when they have a 'hardcore' and loyal fanbase, think again. If you think that any company in the world would not fire you if it improved their bottom line, think again. They would and they have.

Fanboy territory is even more rugged than the console fanboys when the subject of stars is introduced. Yes, you guessed it. Star Wars vs Star Trek. This is nerdology at it's finest. Who would win in a fight, the borg or the empire. Darth Vader vs Captain Kirk. Han Solo vs Spock. Princess Leia in the gold bikini vs T'pol. These are all obvious answers (Empire, Kirk, Solo and T'pol in that order).

There is only ONE good thing that has fanboy as a name in this world. It is the movie by Kyle Newman. It is out now. I highly recommend you see it.

Why Shellshock 2 Shucks.

2009-02-17T02:47:00.000-08:00

Eidos latest greatest video game title was revealed to the European game playing, and more importantly paying, public on the 13th of February. Yes, that is Friday the 13th. Friday the 13th has not been, if anecdotal evidence is queried, a good day for anything to happen, unless your name happens to be Jason Voorhees and you like kids, cornfields and drunken parties.

In fact, playing Shellshock 2: Blood Trails in a cornfield is probably the best place to initiate such an activity, as cornfields are notable for having no electricity supply, thereby forcing you to not play the game. Not playing Shell Shock 2 should be recommended by your doctor. Wanting to play it is an unhealthy habit. Not like smoking, that gives the promise of a long slow demise over time, or, if you are lucky, dieing quickly in a house fire started by one of your not-quite-stubbed-out cigarette butts, because playing Shellshock 2 is something that you will NEVER forget, but will always want to. What has been seen cannot be unseen. You may even long for death afterwards. No, in fact, you will.

Some back ground perhaps.

Shellshock 2: Blood Trails is the culmination of four and a half years of development by British developers Core Design. That may sound familiar, and so it should. They were the people who gave us the very first incarnation of Tomb Raider, back when the Saturn was the console of choice and Lara Croft was a mere handful of badly textured polygons.

It is the sequel to the extraordinarily mediocre Shellshock: Nam '67, which came out in 2004. The first game in the series sold to over 900,000 morans, I would be surprised if this most recent addition to the series sold 9.

According to an 'industry source', the development of the title can be surmised thusly. When Eidos let Crystal Dynamics take over the development of Tomb Raider, there was little for Core Design left to do, rather than make a sequel to their highly unacclaimed Vietnam shooter. In 2006, shortly after SCi LTD bought Eidos, they restructured somewhat. They let Core Design go for a song to Rebellion Developments as there was no need for an extraneous dev house. There was however one clause in this selling off of assets that stated that Core Design owed Eidos a "Next-Gen game".

I think you can begin to see where this is going. Now if I were Core Design, and owed someone a legacy game, and wished to get rid of that person sharpish, I would fob them off with something that was originally destined for the PlayStation 2. Something that no-one wanted, like a quadriplegic puppy with lactose intolerance. Shellshock 2 seems to be this very game. Four and a half years cannot save something that does not want to be saved. You can polish that turd all you want, but the turd is still there, albeit gleaming and shiny, a turd remains none the less.

If you have not seen any Shellshock 2 footage, purchased the game or even heard of it, allow me to enlighten you as to its grandeur.

It features level design of the flawed variety. Not flawed in some minor way, say a particular choke point that is more difficult than most to overcome, but flawed from the outset. The kind of level design that pains you to have to trudge through. The kind that makes you long for Left4Dead.

The levels are not only flawed in the empty phase, before they are filled with AI's, players and scripting, but afterwards too. There are some set pieces in the game, the kind where you must defend a position until for some reason you have magically accomplished something unseen and probably mystical, which triggers the game to allow you to progress forwards. The set pieces never feel like fun, they just seem to be devised as a means of extending the gameplay by forcing you to stay in one spot. If you can't move, you can't complain. Unless you look around you that is. Then you will find plenty to complain about. The obvious spawn points behind trees or rock outcroppings that send the same surges of enemies towards you again and again until you realise you must cross the invisible boundary etched into the floor by a scripter. Once past this point, the enemies seem to become adverse to you in the way that Fox News are adverse to reason.

The AI is what people 'in the industry' call abysmal. Actually, no, anyone would call it that. They seem to follow the same paths, relentlessly seeking their targets. You may note when playing that they can always see you. No matter where you may be, behind rocks, taking cover in thick bushes or tree trunks. They can always see you, and find it physically impossible to miss. I thought the days of this were over, what with the Conflict Series apparently ended. I was wrong. But I would rather be proved wrong, and that Eidos can still push out such trite than have them shock me with a genuinely good title. I am too young to die from a shock induced heart attack. Sometimes they may be so far away and hidden that the only way to locate the enemy is by using your damage indicator as a sort of 'pain radar', allowing you to locate the source of annoyance and eliminate it (in this case it is the game, not an errant AI).

The textures are amazingly of the 'Next-Gen-Brown' palette, despite this being set in a jungle. You read right, there is more brown than green in this game. This is the kind of texture and palette that I could create in MSPaint, with no hands. Or arms. Or Legs. In fact sheer force of would produce viscerally better results than that which is presented in Shellshock 2.

The shooting part, let's be clear about this, the main part of the game, is even worse than you could imagine. Even worse than the visible render lag in Killzone 2 that was passed off by the developers as them making it 'heavy' to increase 'realism'. It feels like your gun is wandering through a vat of treacle. A twitch based treacle, if you can even imagine such a thing. Bobbins, absolutely bobbins. There is not a single thing that appeals about it. One reviewer said this of the frag grenades,

"Throwing grenades is a complete lottery, and the explosive effect is roughly akin to a firework you'd take back to the shop for a refund."

If that is not enough to put you off, then I don't know what is. A colleague of mine thought that, perhaps, for a change, I should not focus on the negative, but on the positive aspects of the game. In my soul, I find nothing that could be represented as positive, but after trawling through reviews, I did come up with one. The loading times. They seem to be mercifully long. So long in fact that you may eventually get tired of waiting and put the controller down and do something else instead. Something validating with your life. Playing this game is not that.

It's not even like Eidos did not know. They knew. I know they knew because several people told them. They chose to ignore those people and put this offal out. I do hope Square Enix are pleased with their expansion into the western gaming market.

A friend of mine in the UK recently over heard someone talking about this very title in a well known Game selling outlet. They said that they "Can't wait to play it, it'll be like a deeper Resident Evil 5, but better cus it's FPS". That will be one of the 9 sales right there then. Only eight to go!

If for some reason you do not believe me, not only are you wrong, but I would like to draw your attention to the ever present Metacritic ratings for this game. The PC version is not out for another three weeks, presumably to add that last feces covering veneer, but the reviews are in and averaged for the PS3 and the Xbox360. At the time of writing the PS3 leads the pack with an average of 34%. One of the Ps3 reviews went so far as to award a 2/10. Here are a few select quotes just in case you are still having a hard time (I'm talking to you 'deeper than resident evil 5' man) figuring this one out.

"Had this been released five years ago it would still have stood out as a poorly made FPS" - VideoGamer

"Shellshock 2: Blood Trails is an insolvent try to bring back to life a forgettable war franchise, changing its context to the horror style. No matter from which angle you choose to look at Blood Trails, it’s a horrendous videogame. Boring, exasperating, and ugly in the most literal sense of the word." - 3DJuegos

"Up against World at War, Killzone 2 and Halo 3, it's a complete joke. The worst FPS I've played since Turning Point: Fall of Liberty." - Eurogamer

"Shellshock 2 is one of the most poorly designed and unplayable games this generation." - X360 Magazine UK

"Miserable graphics, poor sound and a story which isn’t able to fascinate – this game is a no-go. Maybe the king of no-gos. Don’t play this title, it will definitely be wasted time." - GamingXP

"The Vietnam War has never seemed so horrific in this shockingly poor first person shooter." - Teletext GamerCentral

Teletext! Even a text based free to TV service recognises what most of us can see without the aid of eyes! Shellshock 2 Shucks. There isn't even Multiplayer in it.

As one commentator said. It should be called Shellshock 2/10.

Do not buy this game. I will find you if you do.

Prank Calls

2009-02-08T07:23:00.000-08:00

Some prank calls are hilarious. The few select that are usually involve someone with an Arnold Schwarzenegger sound board calling people up and asking them for pizza. Either that or just phoning someone up and playing this down the phone.

Then there are other prank calls. The ones that get to your PC.

Some of you reading this may not know this, but you are being prank called right now. Allow me to explain. Your computer connects to the Internet. It does this not by one small connection, but by hundreds, if not thousands of connections. They are called ports. They are not secure against people making calls to those ports. If your computer receives one such call to a port, it invariably gives away something about your computer. This could range from the fact that there is actually something there to respond, to the operating system you are using to much, much more sensitive data.

If for some unbeknownst reason you wish not to receive such prank calls, there is something that you can do. You cannot however become ex-directory as with your phone line. You must annex their access to your ports.

I have done with with the program Peer Guardian 2 (PG2). This little program and their delightful owners keep records of all the worst prank callers and will, free of charge, update your copy of PG2 and stop these menacing people from accessing your most delicate information.

It is completely free of charge in all respects, and I would whole heartedly recommend that you download it. You may not think that your computer warrants such attention from anyone, but think again. In order for this entry to be as accurate as possible, I took it upon myself to experiment in this regard. I prepared the following. A brand new PC with a brand new copy of (swedish) Windoze installed. I transferred the PG2 software to it via USB stick so as to have never connected to the Internet before the experiment began.

Let us review. I made a Windoze PC with only the PG2 software installed. It was virginal. I hooked it up to the Internet and must warn you now that the results may shock you. In the very first hour there were no less than NINETY THOUSAND connections made to the ports of the PC. That is more than 20 a second. Not all these connections were blocked by the software, some of them coming from the ISP that I use. Some of them harmless. A lot of them less so.

I partook in no web browsing what so ever. No online games were played. Nothing other than hooking it up to the Internet and updating the "blocked lists" of the PG2 software.

Here are some examples of the type of people that were blocked in the first hour, in no particular order.

Time Warner Telecom - Who the hell? You have a telecoms unit within the business? You make Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. You do not make prank calls. Or at least you didn't until now. Chuff off.

Kettering University - The only outstanding thing about Kettering (a town in the UK) is that it is the home to Kettering Cement. Perhaps the university is a training ground for future cement engineers. Or perhaps it is the training ground for home grown cyber terrorist cells. Who can say? If they stop prank calling me, then perhaps I could be bothered to find out.

University of Essex - At first I thought this was a joke. The words Essex and University do not belong in the same sentence. If you are not from the UK allow me to illuminate you with regards to its reputation. The most memorable and accurate joke regarding the ladies of Essex runs thusly:

Q: Why does an Essex girl wear underwear?
A: To keep her ankles warm.

If that was not enough of a hint, then I would urge you to check the wikipedia link for the university here that allows you to view their motto. "Thought the harder, heart the keener". The very sentence could be composed in Internet speech and emoticons. Disgraceful. They probably do not even know what a port is, let alone how to ping one.

Vodafone Interactive - Why oh why are you looking for me on the Internet? Your abysmal signal coverage and over zealous charging 'schemes' have already alienated me from your customer base. You will get no money out of me. In fact I shall take it upon myself to attempt to alienate more people from it. You have just paid money to make this happen Vodafone. I do sincerely hope you learn your lesson.

Catholic University of Chile - Now I know you are in South America, the continent of love, but that that gives you no recourse to just go about randomly spamming peoples ports. Is there not something in the bible about this? Was God so shortsighted that He did not see the Internet coming? Is this activity something that you cover in confession? I would damn you to the ninth circle of hell, with all the traitors and mutineers.

THE LAW OFFICES OF ROBERT M. ASPAN - You may at first glance, once the brilliant, blinding rays of the CAPS LOCK induced text wear off, think that perhaps my pinkie slipped and I was just too lazy to change it. You would be wrong. Just like the lights get turned off in Bob's Country Bunker in the best film of all time, those letters are in capitals on purpose. This means that not only is Mr. Aspan Internet retarded, but that he is out of touch with the very medium he uses. I think that Mr. R.M. Aspan was probably teased a lot as a child. Having a name that takes the best parts of the anatomy and combines them with a cooking vessel, most likely prompted the juvenile anger and a career trajectory of Mr ButtWok that would ensure that all those that teased him were at some point put behind bars by him. If I was called a BumSkillet, I would probably harbour a deep and varied hatred towards life and want to suppress it by becoming a lawyer. Stop spamming my ports Robert Asshat.

I have left out about 1000 less humerous names, 50% of which seem to be universities. Perhaps they recognise my genius and wish to seek my opinion on matters of national, nay international import. Perhaps University computers are just the worst protected on the Internet and they have all fallen pray to zombie bot net incursion and inclusion.

In short, the moral of this lesson (or marble if you are Eddie Izzard) is to get Peer Guardian 2. Install it and take joy in the large numbers of rejected prank phone calls you get. Either that or hire Arnie or Mr T. to prank call them back and see how they like it.

Scient-lol-ogy

2009-01-30T04:19:00.000-08:00

It amazes me how well it does for itself.

I have been bereft of vitriol the past few weeks, life having treated me with a relative light touch, then smashing down upon my head like a cartoon hundredweight. This is why the posts have been a bit few and far between.

Then comes the news to my inbox like a speeding leper on TCP. Nancy Cartwright has made a scient-lol-ogy robat call. One of those fellas that plays the automated message as soon as you answer the phone.

Not content with being the worlds most hated religion, the powers that be at Xenu headquarters thought it would probably be better P.R. to get another celebrity in on the action to annoy people, by sending them robat messages.

If you are one of the unlearned unwashed masses that stalwartly refuses to either learn or wash, then you may be in need of some enlightenment regarding this particular 'religion'. Allow me.

Once upon a time there was a man named Lafayette Ronald Hubbard. He was not related to the Old Mother. This non-relation of the Nursery rhyme inhabitant wanted money. Sprilla, fem-fems, cheese, dough, bread. You get the picture. Wikipedia has this little nugget on him.

"According to The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, ed. Brian Ash, Harmony Books, 1977: "... [Hubbard] began making statements to the effect that any writer who really wished to make money should stop writing and develop [a] religion, or devise a new psychiatric method."

To surmise, new psychiatric method + religion = cash. A brief overview of Scientology will bring these facts to your attention. Scientology is desperate to be taken as a 'religion'. It proposes a new psychiatric method, and charges money for you to be a part of it. It should come as no surprise to those that have actually read whatever it was that was said above will come to a possibly shocking conclusion.

What if he just made it up? What if L. Ron Hubbard, a science fiction writer, just made up all the beliefs of Scientology, like the galactic overlord Xenu banishing souls of extra terrestrials to the planet Earth.

That would make you a sceptic, and non-believer in the eyes of all those Scientologists.
That would be a shame.

Now the technical minded among you will cry foul of this immediately. Surely, if one were to charge mandatory fees for advancement instead of tithing, Scientology should be considered a cult. Well it is. In several countries. In fact, some high court judges have decreed it exactly in that light. Some going so far as to call it 'dangerous'.

I do not think it is dangerous. I think, controversially, that it is actually a helpful source of good in the world. Or at least mine. I don't have to do any of the personality tests Scientology is famous for because they have already been done on others by Scientology for me.

Let me get this straight right here and now. I am not a Scientologist, nor will I ever be one. I walk past the people offering me a free personality test with a forced rictus of a grin and a polite "No thank you". Apparently, a half-brick to the face is 'illegal' according to Constable Whittaker.

Scientology is not useful in anything other than a social sense. Allow me to give you a couple of examples.

1)
GAME OVER is meeting a couple of friends for a drink in a local bar, famous for refusing service without motive. The friends walk in with another in tow.

GAME OVER "Hi guys, who's this fella you're with?"
THE GUYS " Hi GAME OVER, this is Toby."
TOBY "Hi GAME OVER. I Like the seminal hip hop group Ugly Duckling for their fresh rhymes, phat beats and all round awesomeness, with none of the trappings of modern rap, including, but not limited to, pointless beef, misogyny and hatred for others success."

Conclusion: GAME OVER and THE GUYS and TOBY get along fine all night long.

2)
GAME OVER is meeting a couple of friends for a drink in a local bar, famous for refusing service without motive. The friends walk in with another in tow.

GAME OVER "Hi guys, who's this fella you're with?"
THE GUYS " Hi GAME OVER, this is Toby."
TOBY "Hi GAME OVER. I'm a Scientologist."

Conclusion: GAME OVER ignores TOBY all night long and ponders the benefits of freindship with 'guys' who know Scientologists.

Scientology is useful for something. It is an excellent social marker, allowing people such as myself to summarily dismiss people from their lives based solely on intelligence. By intelligence, I mean willingness to subvert oneself to something even worse than a religion.

Other than that, Scientology really has a lot to answer for. Tom Cruise being somewhere around the top of the list. I'm sure there are few amongst us who can forget the time he revealed himself to be a younger version of Senator Palpatine.

Not only does Captain Cruise Control affiliate himself to the church of flying alien souls, but so do several hundred other celebrities, possibly, a sceptic might suggest, due to the exceptional press intrusion prevention into their lifestyle. Or more likely, through ignorance of factual evidence.

These are some of the poor lost souls.

Beck
John Travolta
Nancy Cartwright (Bart Simpson)
JASON LEE (I thought he had way more sense.
Isaac Hayes
Chacka Khan

Is there nothing we can do for these poor lost Thetans? Hopefully a solution will present itself.

Facebook Applications

2009-01-13T05:53:00.000-08:00

They should chuff off.

I'm not saying I hate them, only that I despise them. Not only do they clutter something up that is meant to be at least vaguely uniform and un-pimpable like MySpaz, but they get right on my nerves.

That is not to say that I have none on my FriendsFace page. I have a few. Photos, Events, Videos, Swedish Word of the Day. That's about it really. All the others just seem so full of themselves. Perhaps some examples would enlighten you like the Grigori in training you really are. So here we go. The names of the guilty have been purged to protect you from them.

1) The quiz application. Or rather, more specifically, the movie quiz application. Here is an example of what is wrong with that application.

'Blahblahblah took the What Film? movie quiz and scored 100%!
Blahblahblah got 24 out of 24 correct for a score of 100%. 104,652 people have taken it so far. Take the quiz to beat Blahblahblah's score>'

The unnecessary exclamation mark is bad enough, worse still is the repetition of the first line. I already know that Blahblahblah got 100%. Why tell me again?

Then comes the running total of idiots that have taken it. As if the creators think I for some reason will be urged towards imparting my personal information by the sheer force of numbers that make up their target audience. I will not.

Lastly but by no means leastly(?) comes the idea that somehow I could beat a score of 100%. Equal perhaps, but beat? Not on this Earth.

Ludicrous.

2) Next up is something called Causes. I was recently introduced to this by a good friend of mine called Blahblahblah. This is not the same Blahblahblah that loves to take movie quizzes, but an entirely different Blahblahblah. Causes seems to be an application that allows you to send "Worthwhile causes to sign up to" to your friends. Perhaps my gripe here does not center on the Causes application itself, but the particular Cause that Blahblahblah sent to me.

It was entitled "A Real man never hits a woman". Does that statement not imply an inherent inequality between the sexes and therefore that a "Real man" can never be a feminist?

I know of not a *single* woman that wouldn't hesitate, were the situation to call for it, to leave her foot in the soft and danglies of any man that dared cross her.

Doesn't sexual equality imply equal treatment of the sexes by one another? Thereby allowing the "C&%¤ Punt" manoeuvre?

If Chyna (of WWF fame) were fighting you, I'm sure that you would give her a kick to somewhere, or a desperate flailing of the arms certainly.

Perhaps it is supposed to corral all men into compliance lest they be judged something other than a "Real man"? Heaven forbid that I do not fit into this oh so illustrious category.

Whoever gave Causes the right to define such a term anyway? A "Real man" should surely be logically defined by the parameters of heartbeat combined with soft and danglies.

Idiotic.

3) Superpoke. What is a superpoke anyway? Is it something that is infinitely better than poking someone? Poking someone is at best a very annoying habit. A super version of that would surely be the superlative of poking. Worse still.

Let us analyse some of the 'best' of the superpoke abilities.

Throwing a sheep. Who throws a sheep? I mean really? It's ridiculous.

High five. Isn't that like a Terrorist Fist Jab? I hate you.

Adopt a pet with. A pet? Seriously? If you have children, then there is no way in hell you are going to go around creating extra electronic based responsibility for yourself. Anyone who is not a parent is highly unlikely to do that anyway. In point of fact it is pointless. At least it doesn't pee on the carpet though.

I could go on and on about these applications, but I feel the best way to educate the populace is to update my status every three seconds to a variable of:

"GAME OVER HATES ADDING APPLICATIONS"

If that showed up on your wall once every three seconds ad infinitum, surely you would get the hint and stop asking me to add them?

If not you are of the character described in the previous post.

Idiots

2009-01-11T14:03:00.000-08:00

Where did they all come from?

Whilst in the UK recently, I had the revered opportunity to take the London Underground. No one likes the Tube. It's something that we suffer collectively as a 'British Thing'. In New York, people are just afraid, not angered. In the UK, people are angered because of idiots.

There are ALOT of idiots on the Tube.

I am more than sure that when I was last forced to utilise the Tube on such a regular basis for such a long time that there were not as many. Have they been multiplying? Is this how the film Idiocracy starts? With the UK's public transport system?

There seems to be no way to weed them out effectively at the moment.

There is a very simple system on the tube for paying for your ticket. It is called an Oyster Card. When you get to the ticket stall, you touch the card to the bright yellow circular reader. It reads your card and opens the gate. This whole system of touching and gate opening can happen in as little as 1 second.

Touch, Open, Pass.

It really is that simple.

Or so it would seem. There are some pre-requisites for this to occur. Firstly, the person who wishes to pass the gate must have their card ready. Ready to touch the bright yellow circle. Idiots do not know how to ready their card. By getting it out of their pockets. This leaves people standing in front of the gate, fiddling around in pockets or purses. Blocking the gates.

It does not occur to these people that they could simply move to the side and allow the frequently immense stream of people to pass them by.

As an experiment I stood (out of the way) and observed some of these people fidgeting around looking for their elusive RFID chip enabled Oyster Card.

Five whole minutes. That's how long one idiot took. Amazing. It's almost as if they were magically transported there with no prior warning that there would be a ticket gate. Almost as if they had not just spent an hour on the tube getting there. In full knowledge that this moment would come. Five minutes was the worst offender, but in the twenty minutes I stood there, there was more than just one person deserving of the moniker idiot. Eight. EIGHT. How is it possible that they have integrated themselves into society unbeknown to the rest of the world?

The gate blockers are not the only idiots though. They have relatives in the idiot tree of life.

These relatives are of course the real blockers. The people who are one minute walking along one of the many line-interchange routes, perhaps changing from the Circle line to the Victoria line, inside a pedestrian tunnel two and a half meters wide and feel the need to just stop. No apparent reason, just stop.

Watching this happen from the other side of people traffic is like watching someone set off dominoes, but in reverse. Pile up. Amazingly, the idiots always manage to get annoyed at the people behind them walking into them, as if they had given off all the warning signals in the world that they were about to stop (Klaxxons, red lights, warning beacons, shotgun rounds fired into the ceiling, an "I'm about to stop sign"). To this day I have never seen a valid reason for one stopping, but stop they do.

The third type of blocker is possibly the most infuriating. They are the blocker that will not, under any circumstances, move down the carriage to make more space for other fellow passengers. Oh no sir, not on your nelly. Not only would this allow other people to board the train, but would alleviate many from the cramped conditions that daily force people towards other peoples sweaty armpits.

Why move, when half of your body is in space and others are coveting your space? I suppose this is part of the herd like mentality of the human race. Don't do something ingenious or clever. Just stand there and be an idiot. It suits you better.

There is something we can do however. I implore you to write to London Underground. Write to them and ask that a mandatory IQ test be given to people when they apply for an Oyster Card. Perhaps this could weed out some of the chaff from the largely chaff based populace?

The Power Of PR

2009-01-07T13:55:00.000-08:00

Stephen Fry can teach us all many things. This much we should all know.

From the sincere and pure genius of A Bit of Fry and Laurie, Cold Comfort Farm, Blackadders 1 through 4 and Jeeves and Wooster to the more recent and fantasmagorical QI, he has always delivered. Not once has he let us down, and with the wonders of Absolute Power, there has been no discrepancy in his record.

Absolute Power is a tale of PR. A Tale of when spin doctoring went wary and the public cried out for something different. Something was given to them in the guise of Fry, parading as Charles Prentiss. It was something wonderful. As a herd, the people flocked.

It is this very behaviour I take issue with.

I mean who are you people anyway?

Some explanation. I have hooked into this very blog a dark and seedy underbelly, woven into the very fabric of each post. It is Google Analytics. It shows me things.

I am going to break from the norm and share these things with you. In picture format no less. Regular readers (both of you) will know how much I despise pictures in text. So here we go. Brace yourself, with pheasants.

Right there. Big pointy waps. Bazoongas. Hooters. Bazookas. Fun Bags. Bristols. Gazongas. Baps. Boules. Cocos. Domingas. Cans. Tetangas. Papayas. Tatas. Chi-chis. Grudis. Siskis. Bublur. Mliekarne.

That was me that was. I made those. I am like a God.

All it took was your herd mentality and my intellect. I drove you there. All it took was an experiment over three days. It ran thusly.

Day 1 - Open every story on the front page of Digg in a new tab. Visit all tabs with the URL http://testingthetesters.blogspot.com/ in the copy buffer. Anywhere that allows you to leave comments without registering, leave the URL residing in your copy buffer as a comment preceded by a gratuitous single word such as "Wow" or "Great".

Day 2 - Become amazed at your new found instant Internet 'fame'.

Day 3 - Repeat Day 1's activities, but with more gloating.

I say gloating. What gloating or kudos is there really in showing morans something they can click on, and then having them freely click on it?

It's not really as satisfying as you would imagine. All I ask is that the next time you see a link, just think about what you are doing, whether you want to go wherever it will take you, and the power PR has over you.

Hangovers

2008-12-13T08:00:00.001-08:00

All but the most religious of us have had them.

All but the most masochistic of us hate them.

I am sporting the perfect amount of one at this very moment.

I am quite lucky, amongst my fellow game states, that I do not very often at all get hangovers. Despite what can only be described as a legendary alcoholic intake level, resulting in a liver the size of a marble, The morning after feeling is not something I am overly familiar with. In fact this is my 6th hangover in nearly twice as many years. I am at work though.

Work is the wrong place to have a hangover. That is unless you work where I do and the producer makes you lunch as a thankyou for coming in on the weekend like a fuzzily viewed carrot dangling from the stick of overtime.

The cure for hangovers is a very simple one. Drink a pint or pint and a half of water before going to bed. The headache is caused directly through dehydration, but as we all know, drinking alot of water when hung over generally makes you feel a bit sick. The last thing you want when your head already feels like pandas have attempted to mate with your ears. The "full body ache" is also caused by dehydration. Obviously alcohol is a great dehydrater.

My hangover comes not from ignorance of the causes of hangovers, but from general stupidity. When waking up this morning, realising I was already an hour late for 'work', I saw next to my bed, the still full pint glass of water. Not only had I failed to protect myself towards the possibility of a hangover, but my body had failed me and given me one as well.

You win this time nature. Mark my words though, I'm coming for you.

A Departure From the Norm

2008-12-08T03:53:00.000-08:00

This entry is different.

This entry has no hate in it. OK well maybe just a little hate, but probably not until the very end.

There once was a band. A band that called itself D:REAM. Some of you may remember this band. They also provided the song "Things can only get better" for the 'New' Labour party of the UK to use in their rise to government. I cannot and will not hold this against them.

Don't get me wrong now. New labour turned out to be Old Labour in the proverbial sheep's clothing. They proudly trumpeted a move away from the old boom and bust economics of the previous Tory government, whilst attempting to keep private finance initiatives off the books, so as to maintain some sort of good book keeping, which eventually helped with the recession we now face. Thanks Gordon Brown!

But enough hatred of idiotic MP's, lets move on to the real meat and potatoes of this post. The keyboard player.

This is no ordinary keyboard player. This is the fantastic Dr Brian Cox. Thats right, doctor. Of particle physics no less. A professor at the University of Manchester. A man that works on the ATLAS detector at the non-black hole creating Large Hadron Collider.

He is also a television presenter, and was the scientific advisor on the seminal film Sunshine.

There have been to date, two episodes of the BBC educational/documentary series Horizon that he has presented. They are fascinating. Time and gravity, the two most elusive mysteries of mankind. He doesn't have all the answers. No one does. But he presents the theories behind them in a way that engages the viewer like no other. He has enthusiasm for physics. It lets you understand what you would previously not.

I would highly recommend them to any one and everyone.

In case learning the essential stuff of the universe is not enough for you, then have some 80's rock, with outrageous mullets. At 3:30 Brian Cox can be seen rocking out in true mullet style.

Rock on.

Sequels

2008-11-26T13:09:00.000-08:00

They, like remakes, are almost never a good idea.

I have endured my fair share of sequels. Some I have even allowed to continue to the depths of prequeldom. A tragedy that has encountered even the most successful of the box office hits. I will never trust George Lucas again. Some things that he inflicted upon others should be inflicted upon this man.

I would attempt to sway you, the agreeing reader, but I know that you are not stupid, and agree.

Just in case you are an expendable web spider, dutifully trawling the ineterwebnet for search results, I shall offer these examples for your consideration. You stupid robot.

Star Wars - Well what did you expect? You wanted me to start off lightly on the old feller? George Lucas needs his head checked. Well actually he doesn't. He just needs his greed gene removed. Also his destroy your childhood gene removed. I think the sequel to the 'original' Star Wars (4th) was possibly one of the best movies ever made. It's a shame that his ranch in California cost so much. If it hadn't, we may have been spared the horrors of Jar Jar Binks. I think I threw up a little in my mouth from just typing that name. Blargh.

The Matrix - Why? Were the Wachowski's late for the rent? I blame Tolkein. Yeah that's right. You read right. Tolkein. If he hadn't written that lesser known trilogy of his, then the Wachowski's wouldn't have developed a drive to bring serial fiction to cinema. I would prefer it if they brought their car to a halt after the cliff edge had passed. Stop living off your one success.

The Karate Kids - All of them. The one with Hilary Swank, the one that is going to be made by 'big Wille style' Smith and his spawn. How can this happen. Again. Will Smith is now very firmly nearing the top of the list. His days may be numbered. Correction. Are. There is no Pat Morita. There can only be failure, as there was in 1994.

The Godfather Part III - Wait a minute. La Cosa Nostre and the Vatican? That doesn't even make sense. I will waste no more words on this.

The Blues Brothers 2000 - I hate you. I hate you with the fire of a thousands suns. And not our puny main phase 1.9891 ×10³⁰ kg crappy sun. I mean a thousand stars the size of Betelgeuse. This is my most favourite film of all time. I can never forgive you for this. Top of the list. Never coming off.

Batman & Robin and other Battymen- Stick to the Oceans 17 or whatever it is you do George Clooney. And Robin? Die on the high wire. You are crap. The movie is crap. Even the most recent Dark Knight was crap. At least Detective Comics are going to kill off Batman soon. Maybe they will kill off more sequels too. I mean really. Nipples on the Batsuit? It's never going to beat the Cobblepot meets the Walken.

Caddyshack II - No Bill Murray. No point.

Spiderman III - Just stop Sam Raimi. Stop him with something heavy. Something that hurts when it lands on your head, dropped from Sweden by an angry blogger. An anvil maybe? Sam Raimi actually gave us one of the best sequels ever made, but this sequel had three too many villains, two too many dance numbers, and one too many emo haircuts. That and the scene where Spiderman leaps in front of a giant USA flag. I actually turned off my illegally downloaded copy of it right there and then. Then I hit shift+delete.

For all my vitriol, you may be wondering (although likely not as you agree with me) what sequels were ever made that were any good? There were some obviously. I could rant on and on about their merits, but probably don't need to as they are plaintively obvious to anyone with sensory organs.

Aliens

Army of Darkness (The Evil Dead III)

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (the one without all the walking)

Clerks II

The Empire Strikes Back

Desperado

Star Treks (multiple)

Indiana Joneses

Debbie Does Dallas Daily 27

If only film makers would actually try a little, and not just sit down in front of a typewriter and knock out some crap with dollar signs firmly lasered onto their retinas, people like me wouldn't have to tell you all about it.

I will never forgive you for the Blues Brothers 2000 (released in 1998? Just why?). Never.

Getting Served In Sweden Pt II

2008-11-21T07:38:00.000-08:00

As yet I have not seen any piping hot B-Boy antics, served fresh from the warm oven glove of love that Sweden calls it's youth. Not once have I been danced in front of by someone wishing to show up my lack of demonstrable break dancing. I am not angry, just disappointed.

I have however, as long time reader(s?) will recall, been mistaken for either a drunk, or an underage.

Some clarification perhaps.

The law in Sweden states that one must look at least 25 years or older in order to purchase alcohol. That is without the need for ID being brought into the equation. If you have said ID, then it is possible to be 21 and secure this purchase. I am not 21. I am not even 25. I am one of those people that yearns to be 25 again. I am in fact sizeably older than 25, and have been literally amazed at the prospect of having to carry ID around with me. My passport is something for exotic locations, warmer climbs, not something to be carrying in the rain to get a bottle of rum for the weekend.

Sadly this is the state of affairs I find myself in these days.

I had gotten used to it.

That is until a week ago.

I was playing one of my favourite Swedish-based shopping games. Choose the lane checkout aisle based on who is the hottest checkout girl. Something one can still play in continental Europe without England's detestable Self Service Checkouts. Then the Swedish hit me. I cannot say what it meant. Or at least I could not until I asked her in Swedish if she spoke English. She did. Then the English hit me.

"Do you have any ID?"

I stumbled. For the second time in my life, dumbstruck.

"But I'm older than God"

Is what I should have said. I did not. I professed my exclamation, punctuated with a couple of made up swear words. Then thought about what could possibly require ID.

Cigarettes.

If you have been around since God was a boy, you still have to have ID for cigarettes. The legal age in Sweden for the purchase of cigarettes is 18. I know I do not look 17. If i did, I would still be applying for student discounts and getting into student unions. I do none of these things. Therefore I do not look 17.

I should take it as a compliment. Or at least that is what I have been told. I should take it up with a manager more like.

The anger and vitriol subsided, however, when I learnt that if you look under 25, you must provide ID to prove you are over 18.

That's a hell of a boundary.

At least in Japan you get self service cigarette machines that allow you to hold up a picture of a film star from a magazine and get away with it.

Remakes

2008-11-16T03:09:00.000-08:00

They are almost never a good idea.

If you are in any doubt about this, take a look at some of these examples.

The Punisher - A lone vigilante psychopath ex-cop takes on bad guys and does what his name implies. Originally 'acted' by Dolph Lundgren. A man so hard as to give Rocky a tough time. Note to studio executives: Bringing in the Highlander does not automagically make your movie good, or even better than Catwoman.

Superman - The one superhero who's weakness everyone knows. Kryptonite. Its not that hard to recognize. It's the only glowing green crystal on the planet. Possibly universe. What happens when Superman is near kryptonite? He becomes Clark Kent. The real Clark Kent. A hack with barely enough strength to life finger to typewriter. What happens in the remake? He lifts up an ENTIRE CONTINENT of Kryptonite and throws it away. A pointless cinematic journey. Failed you could say.

The Italian Job - No no no no no no no no no no no no NO!

The Pink Panther - Steve Martin was a really good stand-up comic. He has even given us the delights that are Bowfinger, The Jerk, Roxanne, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (itself a remake) and the Man With Two Brains. He should have just given us those. Not write and star in something that only serves to denigrate Petter Sellers' memory.

Transformers - Orson Wells is dead. This is a big problem. There is no solar system spanning God-Transformer called Unichron in this new Micahel Bay directed catastrophe. There is no death toll higher than most war films in the first five minutes. There is no Monty Python member in it. There is actually very little transforming. I thought the clue was supposed to be in the name.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Tim Burton should not direct children's stories. The one good thing about this particular Roald Dahl classic was that it had Christopher Lee in it. That is all. Stick to emo/goth/whateverthehellyouare Tim Burton.

There have however been at least three good remakes in the history of cinema. Three is not a lot. Considering how many remakes there are, The Ring was remade only 4 years after it's original hit cinema screens. That's barely enough time for a director to roll in their grave, should they be dead.

If you are wondering what these remakes are that are so good, then wait no longer. I shall enlighten you.

The Thing

Scarface

The Fly

Even as I type this, news reaches my corneas that there is soon to be another added to the list. Oldboy. I love this film like I love ice cream. If someone comes along and puts a dog turd on my ice cream, I am very unhappy. Murderous I believe some call it. Will "Jiggy" Smith and Steven "Holocaust" Speilberg are remaking this fantastic Korean film.

Will Smith as Oh Dae-su? He will most likely use some kind of animatronic or CG'd octopus, and the idea that he would go back for his hammer? Unlikely at best. I wonder if they will even be able to capture the majesty of waking up in a suitcase on top of a building anywhere near as 110% win based as Chan-wook Park? I think it will be conservatively described as "piss poor".

Shame on you. I hope someone comes along and puts dog turd in your ice cream.

Some Form of Sanity

2008-11-10T11:58:00.000-08:00

It seems to have taken hold.

I am eternally grateful.

That's right, along with, most likely, the rest of the detestable blogosphere, I have decided to put aside some of my time for the recent election of President elect Barack Obama.

To understand why only now, the sanity has taken hold, one must remember that the US has been gripped previously by fear and terror that something as bad as 9/11 could happen. Again.

It's not their fault that they voted for the monkey that could do tricks. They were afraid that if they didn't, al-Qa'ida would come and get them. Scurry out of their holes in the mountains and actually go all the way to the USA to put those pig-dogs down.

Well they didn't.

If there was such a thing as God, then I would thank it too. Not only does the USA now not get another four years of the Republican party, but there is a greater boon still. Sarah Palin goes back to Alaska.

This woman is deserving of ridicule. It's almost too easy. But not too easy enough that I will stay my tongue. To say she is stupid and uninformed would be an insult to words. The woman thought Africa was a country. She probably thinks that America is a country too. Strange that Fox News knew of this, yet strangely declined to release this nugget. They are not biased, and Bill O'Reily is a real journalist.

Were there any doubt when she was selected by McCain's people as to her intellectual credentials, then the infamous Katie Couric interview should have hammered the final nail into that particular coffin.

The woman believes she can see Russia from her back yard. When asked what newspapers she reads, she responded with:

"All of them"

All of them? The Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet will be very surprised and happy I'm sure, to find out that she reads their product. Similarly, the often respected Nigerian News may erect a statue in her honour, beloved, as I'm sure they were, that their daily digests come across her desk.

Strange that when pressed for a single name of a newspaper, not a single one came to mind. The poor girl. All that campaigning and illegal firing of Public Safety Commissioner's must be getting to her.

NAFTA. Even I know which countries are in NAFTA, and I live in Sweden. There are not that many to memorise. Too many for this hard working hockey mom from the north though. Three. Count them. It will only take up one hand if you do it right. Canada, Mexico and the USA. The clue is in the name really.

I shall not mention the $150,000 clothing bill, the garbled responses to questions, or the fact that she has had two retard kids, one with an unfortunate bout of downs syndrome, the other volunteering for Iraq (thank you Doug Stanhope), or even that she cannot come up with a single supreme court decision in the history of the USA that she disagrees with other than Roe vs Wade (made abortion legal). I fear however it may be too late.

So once again. Thank you USA.

At least now racism is over.

21 Seconds To Go

2008-10-22T11:43:00.000-07:00

No.

Not the seminal R'nB song by So Solid Crew, which wowed critics with its lyrical construction, all the verses being exactly 21 seconds long.

The 21 seconds it takes the lift at work to ascend to the sixth floor. These are the 21 seconds of which I speak.

The problem is not me.

The problem is the other people.

Perhaps some explanation at this point would be fortuitous. I am a morning person. When I say morning person. I mean I am hyperactive in the least instance of this particular character trait. I will enter the building with a huge smile on my face and a happy greeting for everyone around me, despite my misanthropicism. People getting into the lift in the morning with me can safely expect to be greeted with a hearty "God morgon!" (Swedish for "Good morning") and a grin to make even the Joker hang his head in make-up enhanced shame.

Other people, it seems, do not share my enthusiasm for another day of life.

My one goal in this world is to live forever. So far, I have a 100% success rate. Not everyone can boast this.

Other people seem discontented with their lot. They appear on Monday mornings filled with dread at the prospect of another week at work. They seem to forget that every week is topped off by two days of not working. The weekend is something to look forward to and to treasure. The countdown to it? Pure ecstasy.

The 21 seconds of lift time can only be filled with awkward chit chat. At best.

Swedish people are not great at chit chat. In the same respect as Britney Spears not being great at parenting.

Topics of conversation range from work to what proclivities took hold of them in their free time. Never does the conversation overrun. Never does it even make it to 18 seconds.

Except for once.

6 men entered. Not all left.

I was one of the six. A friend of mine another. He had just started learning Swedish at this point, in the way that everyone starts to learn a foreign language when they are immersed in said culture. Profanity first.

Observing the 6 men in a lift situation, he uttered forth "Oooh. Berg Hög". This translates roughly to "Big gay man pile". Tension was rife. You could have cut the air with a balloon.

Awkward laughs all round. Then the misplacement of possessions occurred. A single Swede attempted to refill his mouth's supply of snuss. Snuss is like chewing tobacco, except that you do not chew it. It comes in teabag form, but for the gums. Also it does not contain cancer either. But about 5 cigarettes worth of nicotine. The Swede fumbled his container and it clattered to the floor.

Bending over to pick it up was NOT AN OPTION for this man.

As the doors opened, he shuffled the snuss container forwards with his foot. The inevitable gap twixt elevator floor and level 6's floor approached like a monstrous juggling ball upon the poor snuss container. A swift kick from the Swede's foot sent it hurtling towards it, whereby it snagged on the slightly raised level and plummeted 6 floors to its inevitable resting place.

His loss was jeered by most, revered by none. Had he only waited 21 seconds in homophobic silence and inaction, he would be one snuss container better off.

The funeral for the container will be held in two weeks time.

Bring cake.

Self-Service Checkouts

2008-10-13T19:00:00.000-07:00

What a load of crap.

Never have I seen a more conscientious effort to save on money at the expense of the consumer than this. Well done Tesco, I applaud thee. You get my Ass-hat of the month award. Something that may become a more than annual award anytime soon.

I can imagine the board meeting.

Executive 1: How can we stop paying all these irritating wages and benefits to our staff? They're really going to cut into my bonus this year.

Executive 2: Robats?

Executive 1: Robots! Brilliant! Instead of providing a friendly customer-staff centric interaction that is pleasing for all, we can just do away with the staff and get robots in!

Executive 2: Robats?

Executive 1: Hell, we could even get the customers to do the job the staff were doing in the first place! That way the robots don't have to do too much!

Executive 2: Robats.

It's not like these self service checkouts have made things "faster and more efficient", unless you are looking at the now faster, more efficient profits Tesco is generating.

The interface seems to have been imagineered by a palsy-stricken child on Ritalin, without the natural aid of the eyes. To call it clunky would be to call Sarah Palin a great choice for government. Not only is the response time woefully absent in any form other than what seems like hours, but the menu flow is appalling. I thought this was the age of Pentium computers and such things. Designers must surely have been consulted in the creation of this abortion on programming? I mean everyone loves consultants.

One problem that has not been addressed though is that the self service tills still need regular, vanilla flavoured Humons to help out all the members of the public that become infuriated with the devices. Like a greeter at Walmart, except without the greeting, and just a slow burning loathing for the human race. I sense some ironing here.

Another gripe I have with this "improvement" is that it caters solely for baskets. There is no thought given to someone with a trolley. How to do a main shop in a place that caters only for those thinking perhaps a few hours in advance. Does it matter? Of course not! Profits will go up! Trebles all round!

Trebles that is, unless you are trying to purchase alcohol from a self-service checkout, which will happily chirrup at you that you are trying to buy an age restricted item, and that the help of an operator is required. Humon assistance. Doesn't that smell of some more ironing?

Other problems with having robats in our supermarkets include, but are not limited, to the following:

1) No more idle chit chat with the nice lady behind the checkout concerning how her youngest, Jimmy, is doing at school, now that the paedophilia charges have been dropped.

2) No more embarrassing price checks broadcast to the entire supermarket concerning one shoppers dubious personal hygiene. "Price check aisle 5. Terry how much does Vagi-fresh cost these days?"

3) No more choosing a line based solely on which of the checkout girls you would sleep with.

4) No more "Queue Strategy"

Stop it Tesco. You are making Eddie Izzard's amazing observational comedy obsolete for the next generation.

The Face Of Evil

2008-09-26T08:06:00.000-07:00

Yeah that's right. Evil.

Here it is. The young, elderly, and vulnerable to images may want to shield their eyes.

No. For once, I do not mean Gordon Brown. I mean the bint in the middle. She is Jacqui Smith. She is the British Home Secretary. Jacqui is in dire need of a kick to the face. Right above the mouth, and between the eyes.

Some explanation perhaps.

Jacqui here, has recently, with 24 hours notice, announced that all immigrants must now carry RFID chipped ID cards.

"Big whoopdee-doo. They should go back where they came from." I hear waft over the seas to the shores of Sweden. The bigoted amongst you are misguided.

This will surely affect much more than you could possibly imagine. One man, employed a hundred UK citizens. He also sired two British children. He is not exempt from this rule. I do so dearly hope that those bigots that read this were employed by that man. You will now have no job.

The immigrants who were previously allowed into the UK under the "Highly skilled" banner, must now have a university degree, or leave. Nice choice.

I would be off in a shot. Any country that requires, by law, you to have a degree to enter, when the base level of intellect of that countries denizens is around that of a radish, is in some deep doo-doo.

This RFID chipped card that immigrants will have to carry, will be tied to certain national databases. Those of credit, if indeed there is credit to go around anymore, driving, health and spending. This bodes fantastically well for anyone among the 25 million people that have had their personal details lost by the government already.

The best part is yet to come though. Soon enough, this "trial" on immigrants will come to an end. In that EVERYONE will be required by law to carry a card. Fantastic. Trebles all round. Add to that the fact that the police are now allowed to stop and search anyone they please without any form of suspicion and you get a wonderful, wonderful possibility.

I truly hope that one day, a civil liberties minded policeman will routinely stop and search the members of the cabinet. Then arrest all of them not found carrying ID cards. I predict a high number of them would not carry the cards. But were they to be arrested under the dubious terror laws, then charged with impersonating a member of the cabinet. Then possibly have "coercion" used upon them to extract information, and why they know so much about the private lives of that particular cabinet member.

That would be a thing of beauty.

Irony I believe it is called.

Any takers?

"Those" Lists

2008-09-19T04:28:00.000-07:00

You know of what I type. You receive them in mails from people who believe they are doing good deeds by forwarding something that will put you in a good mood all day, or boost your productivity due to your new rosy outlook on life.

Little do these do-good-ers know that my productivity is actually reduced from reading, occasionally in full, these ridiculous lists of oft "hilarious" information.

I hate those lists. So I have decided to take action. I have decided to dissect one of these lists and review the contents.

So, to the meat and potatoes of the issue.

A group of professional people posed this question to a group of 4 to 8 year-olds: 'What does 'love' mean?'

"Professional people"? I am considered a professional person. This definition worries me greatly. Are we letting random "Professionals" near our children? One could argue, that Ted Bundy was a "Professional", albeit in the realms of bludgeoning weapons and strangulation. Is this the kind of men we are trusting our children with?

The answers they got were broader and deeper than anyone could have imagined.

I don't know. I can imagine some crazy things.

'When my grandmother got arthritis, she couldn't bend over and paint her toenails anymore. So my grandfather does it for her all the time, even when his hands got arthritis too. That's love.'
Rebecca- age 8

No Rebecca, that is the power of ladies not putting out unless they get something that they want. You will come to realise, then manipulate this fact later on in your life. In that order.

'When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different.
You just know that your name is safe in their mouth.'
Billy - age 4

Safe in their mouth? My name is not safe in any one's mouth. It is most commonly used in curses and diatribe. Once Billy grows up, he will find that there is only one thing that is truly safe in someone else's mouth. YOU KNOW.

'Love is when a girl puts on perfume and a boy puts on shaving cologne and they go out and smell each other.'
Karl - age 5

Wrong wrong wrong. Smelling each other is a fetish. Something that it is 79% likely that Karl will develop in his later life. Any fetish, not the specific fetish of smelling another person.

'Love is when you go out to eat and give somebody most of your French fries without making them give you any of theirs.'
Chrissy - age 6

Do your kids enjoy reading complicated literature? Do they like to "share"? They could be a COMMUNIST! Just like little Chrissy here, the Red Scare is real and a part of our daily lives. Way to depend on the state Chrissy! Why don't you just go and occupy Vietnam whilst your at it?

'Love is what makes you smile when you're tired.'
Terri - age 4

I don't mean to disparage against the biology teacher of little Terri here, but seriously? 4 years old and you haven't covered adrenal glands and endorphins yet? Perhaps you are a Creationist Biology teacher. If you are. Please die.

Love is when my mommy makes coffee for my daddy and she takes a sip before giving it to him, to make sure the taste is OK.'
Danny - age 7

Welcome, Danny, to your first encounter with greed. Your mother is unable to give anything away without first taking some of it. Not even coffee! I hope your proud of yourself, mother of Danny. He will grow up to be another disillusioned male.

Love is when you kiss all the time. Then when you get tired of kissing, you still want to be together and you talk more.
My Mommy and Daddy are like that. They look gross when they kiss'
Emily - age 8

I'm glad that they look gross when they do that Emily. Otherwise, you would be an incestuous little blighter. One that thinks that the skank at the bar and the other drunk, male or female, are "really in love" when they are trying to eat each others face off.

'Love is what's in the room with you at Christmas if you stop opening presents and listen.'
Bobby - age 7 (Wow!)

Actually, Bobby, I think you will find that sound is the burps of approval you gin soaked grandma is making, impatiently awaiting the only meal she doesn't cook once in a year.

'If you want to learn to love better, you should start with a friend who you hate,'
Nikka - age 6
(we need a few million more Nikka's on this planet)

Whoever is writing these comments after the "research" that is presented here is obviously mad about cloning. I mean totally bananas for sheep. Nuts about dogs. I'll stop that now. A few MILLION?! Obviously mad as a bag of cups.

'Love is when you tell a guy you like his shirt, then he wears it everyday.'
Noelle - age 7

That's just bad hygiene.

'Love is like a little old woman and a little old man who are still friends even after they know each other so well.'
Tommy - age 6

That is fear of not being able to find someone else during your twilight years.

During my piano recital, I was on a stage and I was scared. I looked at all the people watching me and saw my daddy waving and smiling.
He was the only one doing that. I wasn't scared anymore.'
Cindy - age 8

Did you also notice the video camera in his hand? He uploaded that footage to YouTube you know. You knew that, right little Cindy? There is a whole bunch of graphic designers and nerds "lol"'ing at you right this second. At the time of publication, your video under "Noob tries to play piano in front of audience. Fails. Hilarious. OMWTFBBQ!" is a 2,345,345 views and rising.

'My mommy loves me more than anybody
You don't see anyone else kissing me to sleep at night.'
Clare - age 6

Is that because your daddy left you Clare? Is that the reason? Or is daddy still there, downstairs, at the bottom of a bottle of Jack's and embittered about how you have literally ruined his life. He doesn't kiss you because he doesn't love you. That is what you are saying.

Love is when Mommy gives Daddy the best piece of chicken.'
Elaine-age 5

Elaine. Mommy is just afraid of getting HN-51. She knows the basics of food hygene. She knows that the largest piece of chicken is the one most likely to be undercooked. The one most likely to harbour disease and salmonella. She should know. She cooked it. Sexist.

Love is when Mommy sees Daddy smelly and sweaty and still says he is handsomer than Robert Redford.'
C hris - age 7

No C hris. (I'm guessing you are a hippy, to have a space in your name. Is it a silent Xylophone or something?) Robert Redford is ugly. Ugly like mouldy milk. Yes it takes a lot to make milk mouldy. I told you I could imagineer a lot. Most animals are more handsome than Robert Redford. Whilst we're on the subject (we are?), there is no such word as handsomer. Your comparative adjectives need work.

'Love is when your puppy licks your face even after you left him alone all day'
Mary Ann - age 4

That, my dear, is attention seeking in its most pure form. You will come to understand this, Mary Ann, when you grow up and wish to seek it yourself. I would advise taking the puppy course of action.

I know my older sister loves me because she gives me all her old clothes and has to go out and buy new ones.'
Lauren - age 4

Disillusionment. But hilarious in nature. This came the closest to putting a smile on my face. By smile, I mean removing the rictus. By close i mean in no way what-so-ever.

When you love somebody, your eyelashes go up and down and little stars come out of you.' (what an image)
Karen - age 7

Karen, your astrophysics knowledge is left wanting. Also it seems that you have learnt what love is from children's cartoons. I cannot fault you on part of that, being as you are obviously a child. But the lack of astrophysics? CONDEMNABLE. You should be shot. No trial. No jury. Just shot.

Love is when Mommy sees Daddy on the toilet and she doesn't think it's gross.'
Mark - age 6

One word Mark. Mystique. It is lost on your parents. They are not in love, they are just used to seeing that. Maybe you should introduce something into the equation to allow them to perk up their lives somewhat. It could also introduce a new element in the toilet gazing game they seem to play.

'You really shouldn't say 'I love you' unless you mean it. But if you mean it, you should say it a lot. People forget.'
Jessica - age 8

There is one other exception to this rule. It's when your mommy and daddy say it to each other. Also if a lady is going to give you sex for saying it. You needn't worry about this now Jessica, but at some point in the future, probably ten years from whenever this epic pile of detritus was written, you would be wise to remember it. But you won't. Then you will learn your lesson.

The Motherland

2008-09-16T06:49:00.000-07:00

I recently returned to the UK.

Not permanently, but due to the ticking of the man made 4th dimension.

Time has passed and another relative added another year to the tally. This brought the total years of all that I know to 4576. Not including mine obviously. That would be ludicrous.

What other earthly pleasure could contend with that of riding the Picadilly line back into London from the wondrous Terminal 5 of Heathrow? Certainly none in the realm of mere mortals that is for sure. It would have to be some form of heavenly succor. An Elixir of the Almighty. The very nectar of the Gods, to be able to contend with reading Dirty Des' free paper.

The usual news jumped at me from the front page. "Housing crisis worsens!", "Taxpayers to foot the bill for Prime Ministers £91 million tax deal", "New record set by stabbings in a single night", "Coventry man ate my pigeons!". Just stuff that happens every day.

Then tucked inside the second page I saw it. Like a wart on the page. Jumping out at me as if it had all the locomotive power of a flea. Snagging in my mind like a wordy tumour.

"'Teach Creationism in Schools' Says Biology teacher."

I almost assaulted the nearest person. Unfortunately they had a camera, and I would not have enjoyed the visit to the police station that would surely have ensued. Had they caught me on camera before their last moments occurred.

Thoughts raced through my head. 'Are we that close to the US with our "special relationship" that we wish to adopt their idiotic teaching methods?

'Is there some way that I could kill this teacher and nip this in the bud before its too late and we all start speaking with an Alabama accent about the merits of an Earth 10,000 years old?'

'Where can I buy a gun?'

'Where can I buy two guns?'

'Is it possible to commission the making of a Biology Teacher Seeking Missile?'

'Where does this "Biology Teacher" live?'

'Is this all Tony "Faith Schools are OK" Blair's fault?'

'Seriously, where can I buy a gun?'

Like wasps they swarmed through my mind, stinging my intelligence with their faith based protrusions.

Why would we want to do this to ourselves? Blight our education excellence (*cough*) with people who have no basis for their ideas other than the greatest fictional work the world has ever seen, and fear?

When/if I decide to grace humanity with my progeny, there shall be no room for a misogynistic, sexist, retributional, vengeful asshat-figure in their lives.

None.

This Biologist. He is added to the list.

Bill O'Reilly

2008-09-12T04:44:00.000-07:00

How is it possible that this man is still alive?

I would have thought someone in America would have killed him by now. It's not like they have a lot of housework to do now they don't have houses anymore. They must have loads of free time. Can't one of them find it in their hearts and now not so busy schedules to do the right thing?

Perhaps, in case you are not familiar with the wok of the man, some background is required.

Bill O'Reilly is an idiot. One that unfortunately has a TV show. It's OK though, it's on Fox "News", so can technically be pigeon holed under "unintentional comedy".

Bill O'Reilly is also unhappy with being wrong, which must be difficult for the man due to his unerring ability to be wrong. He has it down to a fine art. Even kid s can see it. Even rappers.

It's not just that he is wrong though. This, on it's own, is not usually enough to incense me to actually pen sentances.

He is loud. To the point of "If I'm loud, surely I must be right. Right?" Which is a shame, as it means that any guest on his show that is of vague interest cannot be heard of over the tirade of tired pro-bible, pro-America, pro-Rupert Murdoch, anti-abortion, anti-homosexuality, anti-cut and run drivel that shoots forth from the man's mouth.

Even the embodiment of awesome that is Richard Dawkins was not to be spared from chit chat that completely ignores the issue.

This is what it has come to then. Issuing a paper on Bill O'Reilly.

America should be less concerned with the race for President. I'm sure it has already been arranged by the Bush dynasty anyway. Concern yourself with getting rid of the chaff from the wheat.

Bill O'Reilly is chaff. He is cuffing chaff.

In his ret.

Kill him now, before it is too late to save the children.

Baggage Handlers

2008-09-03T04:25:00.000-07:00

I've been flying a lot recently. You may think this is just one part of my executive-high-flying lifestyle, and you would be correct.

Not only has my person been transported over international borders recently, but so too have my belongings, although I believe the person came off the better of the two.

I was recently sat at the rear of the plane, for the exit and bulkhead related leg-room. As I awaited the rest of the passengers to realise that if you have found your seat, sitting in it and letting everyone else pass makes boarding go A LOT quicker, I noticed the skill and delicacy of the baggage handlers.

It was a show like no other. Swan Lake has nothing on Gatwick Airports baggage handlers for sheer dexterity and gracefulness of movement. It was as if the very spirit of nimbleness and sleight of hand was putting on a show just for me.

It made me realise what could have possibly happened to the possessions I recently lost on the voyage to Sweden through breakage.

Baggage handlers happened.

How much effort does it take really? The man I saw, if man can be used to describe the beast that befell my eyes, his one remaining eye rolling wildly, seemed to think handling meant throwing. His only useful life skill, that he had hands, for handling bags.

The veracity with which he threw the bags around onto the conveyor was amazing. It was like he was born for it or something.

Something.

Then there are the strikes. How many times have they put off thousands of people's holidays, all for an extra few quid? I think it is the fact that they themselves are not going on holiday that irks them so.

I never put my baggage in the hold of the plane for their ilk. I may have something in it I want to keep.

A pox on them.

Enough is Enough.

2008-09-01T03:30:00.000-07:00

I have had it. Not with blogging, although it does deserve my vitriol and distaste. Not with writing, for it throws up such wonderful opportunites as a "Writers holiday to Amsterdam" to "Work on a script".

I've had it with complacency.

Too long have I stood by the side and not written something. A very intelligent man once told me, that if anything, I should "just keep writing". He was right that intelligent man. Perhaps this could go some way to explaining why he was intelligent in the first place.

Too long have you, my valued two readers had to wait, day upon day for me to update.

From now on it will be different.

From this day forth it will be QUANTITY, not QUALITY.

You're consumers, the both of you. You will go elsewhere if I do nothing.

I shall start to pander to your desires, Like Brittney Spears to the Papparazzi.

I'm not going to shave my head, but I will shave your hair off with my razor sharp witticisms and dreams of self import.

The first to fall under my wrath shall be those of lazy employment. That does not mean me. That means baggage handlers.

Retail Therapy

2008-07-29T03:03:00.000-07:00

Cliche's exist, that's why they have become cliche's. One such example is that of the shopping trip. The lady walking around, man in tow, whilst exploring the many interesting clothes and accessory shops in any given location. Rodeo Drive, Beverly Hills, Oxford Street, we've all seen it in one form or another, whether it be an advert for piles medicine, or in real life.

I have become a cliche.

I had no gripe with the walking around. Exercise in the video games industry is a rare thing, so any opportunity to have movement other than in an office chair is a welcomed with enthusiasm.

Nor were the occasional excessive wait times, as watching life walk past you is often a beautiful thing to witness.

It was the steps. The steps that one must endure when sat outside a clothes shop. Often they are small, occasionally non-existent. Sitting down is often more trail and error than you would think. A smaller target makes for a larger margin of error. If cliches are so obvious, you would have thought that the shops in question would come to their collective senses and reserved space either inside or outside so that the men that get dragged around can sit it out in comfort.

This does not seem to be the case for Florence or Sienna. I have composed a shortened list of shops that were visited and the amenities they afford the cliche traveller. It is my hope that one day a book will be compiled using this as a base, to serve the rest of humanity, so that each would know the best districts to shop. I don't, however, intend to hold my breath on that one.

Florence

Deisel - Good 8" step outside, plenty of room. The proverbial 'thumbs up' of step dwellers. 7/10

Nara Camichie - No step. Obviously too good for the step these guys. Avoid at all costs. 2/10

Miss Trench - Poor 6" step outside. If it is possible, the stool inside was actually smaller. Incredible. They must only cater for Dwarfs. No wonder nothing was bought there. 2/10

Geronica - No step, but a nice leather foot stool inside, for patrons use only, as designated by its own personal sign. These people are serious about stool politics. 5/10

Gucci - A very disappointing step inside, but ample seating within. 6/10

The Bridge - Very poor 4" step. It was difficult to even position oneself upon it. Fortunately the two foot stoolls inside saved their rating like a super hero movie in the summer saves a studio. 5/10

Poncif - If it is possible that one day a 'Worlds worst step' award may be conceived and handed out as the name implies, then surely one day it would rest on the mantle of the Poncif shop. What rapidly filled my vision, like a terrorist's with Jack Bauer's fast approaching fist, was possibly not even an inch from the floor. More a bump than a step. Terrible. The only thing that saved it was the two small stools inside. Although given time they may actually hinder its cause rather than help it. 1/10

Intimissimi - No step, no seating. A cold hard example of how bad hings can be in this 'modern' world. Chilling. 1/10

Massimo Dutti - No step outside. 'They must be saving the seating treats for the indoors.' I hear you think across oceans. You're on the money. A nice large two-seater leather occasion on the inside was my willing host for my visit. 6/10

Guga di Luiginigi - No step. A worrying trend seems to be developing here. One tiny leather stool in a corner so far from anything of interest, it was rather inefficient to occupy. 4/10

Polfini. Great 12" step right outside, great depth and better width. Nothing here needed saving, but the champions at Polfini thought they would put in a 12' leather sofa for good measure. They are surely the favourites for winning this years top gongs. 9/10

Sienna

Chillipepper - A medium quality 6" step outside with a pleasant slope. Things could be worse. One lone seat inside occupied by some one's bag. 5/10

Max and Co. - No step outside. Travesty. No indoor seating. Blasphemy. One set of three steps inside, directly in everyone's way. It's as if they want to anger the step-tourist. 2/10

Bugaglio - Very poor 4" step outside, a mere 8" deep. Pathetic. One chair inside covered in felt, it's only saving grace. 3/10

So may this serve as a warning to all step-tourists. Avoid Poncif and visit Polfini. The two P's of step dwelling have hereby been decreed!

Or just order online from the comfort of your own choice of seating.

Royal Fail

2008-07-20T10:15:00.000-07:00

A tumultuous relationship can be characterised by the frequent to's and fro's between the two, if not many, parties in said relationship. I am therefore to surmise that my relationship with the English Postal service is certainly not tumultuous. It could be called one of gimp and master, or Jack Bauer and Terrorist sans name.

This tale of woe starts many years back, when as a small GAME OVER, many letters were written, much correspondence sent, betwixt myself and other game states. Everything was received and sent without worry or fear. There were no delays. The system worked.

Things, however, have a habit of changing, and change they did.

Privatisation occurred, or as the then government liked to call it, "The ability for competition to exist in the postal sector." And why not? Competition could only be a good thing surely? Something cute and fuzzy that encouraged the habitation of small animals like bunnies, friendly water voles and the like to flourish with plenty of room for all the family. Who could have thought that it would result in more strikes, constant if not regular losses, poor service and a delivery time nearing that of the natural lifespan of a galactic centric black hole?

No one in government obviously.

This is where the meat and potatoes of my gripe sets in.

Three years ago I visited that scary scared nation, the USA. Besides the fingerprinting and iris-scanning to enter the USA, there was little to irk me, besides their love of "terror". Being the good friend I am, I duly purchased duty free cigarettes for a friend of mine, and once returned to blighty, attempted to post them. I say attempted, as getting the damn brick inside the post box was not happening. This is because the slot on the post box was near the size of a mayfly, due to being able to restrict the size of the letter bombs the IRA used to gleefully send around. Fortunately for me a friendly postman arrived, who was more than willing to alleviate me of my item, so he allowed me to dump my package in his sack (Ooh err!).

14 days later and nothing had arrived the half of the way up the UK that I had sent it. Indeed to this day they have not shown up. An unscrupulous postal worked squirreled them away and I do sincerely hope they contract cancer of the lung and possibly the eye to teach them a lesson.

This is not what has incensed me to construct a dazzlingly witty and overly verbose post on the matter. What has is my UK to Sweden relocation, which, 6 months later, is still ongoing. I sealed all my effects in four large tea chests, neatly packed and given ample room all around with several layers of newspaper and bubble wrap. A short taxi ride to the post office and £600 later, I left clutching four tracking numbers in my sweaty mitt, and empty wallet in the other.

Upon arrival to Sweden a week later, I picked up my mail declaring safe arrival of half of my belongings. 'Fair enough' I thought. The Royal Fail do tell you to allow 25 days for your items to traverse customs, and as I had a large amount of spices and other cooking supplies, these could be mistaken for the crack-cocaine I secretly wished them to be, and may have to be opened and delayed. I was also somewhat unfazed as my PC and clothes had arrived, pretty much everything one needs for working in another country. My entire financial history was still in transit somewhere in the North Sea, along with the cooking supplies and several other important, but not life threateningly so, items.

Someone who I shall call Captain Stampy has been at my packages with his feet. Stamping on them, perhaps as you may have gleaned from his name. 90% of everything that could be broken was broken. This man must surely be an artist. Either this is true, or the Royal Fail have gorillas for handlers. Both are probably true.

25 days later and no new arrived were available. Off to the Royal Fail website. The form one must fill out for lost international mail is gleefully "Available from your nearest Post Office.", "Just pop in and ask for the form!" the website happily chirruped at me.

Google Earth thinks that the nearest post office to me is in the Shetland Isles. Google Earth is correct. Thankfully, the Internet can never let you down, only your poor search terms can. So one and a half hours later I managed to find the form and print it off. Incidentally, the Google search took only 0.000085 seconds, slightly faster than the 5 hours round flight time to the Shetland Isles, provided I could charter a private plane, and not have to change somewhere or take the ferry. Whenever Google figure out how to teleport someone via the Internet, I will be first in the queue.

One thing I made sure to do was make a copy of everything I sent back to Royal Fail, as the one thing I could be sure of was that they would probably "loose" everything going into the complaints department.

30 days later I received a letter with the Royal Fail stamp of idiocy all over it. "Hurrah" I thought. They have sent me compensation for all my insured items. Hoping to have a large cheque to fall out, I instead found two letters of acceptance. Acceptance of my original letter of complaint. Wow. 30 days to open a letter? No wonder there was a delay. They must have literally so many lost items that it takes them 30 days to get round to opening the backlog of claims. No wonder the Royal Fail lost out on their "competitive" bid to take over the fire departments rapid response unit. I was assured that there would be action taken on my problem within 30 days or less.

30 days later and one of my boxes has turned up. Captain Stampy, I must say, has become a master of his art. Not a single thing that could be broken was left intact. Even the metal teapot had the lid caved in. Captain Stampy is the new Banksy.

Not only that, but the large curry powder container had been torn to smithereens. That mixed in with the water in the insulating inner layer of a mug formed a lovely yellow paste all over the other clothes and, well, everything.

Captain Stampy 1 GAME OVER 0

Multiple Players = Multiple Funs

2008-07-02T12:43:00.000-07:00

Or not always.

One of the best things about working for a developer as opposed to a publisher is the sheer quantity and quality of influence everyone has over how the game plays and how it feels. An excellent example of which can be found no further away from these pages than the word "Multiplayer".

I do not generally play single player games. They have problems.

What I mean by problems is that you are always up against what only a few men can do. When I say men I am obviously referring to the programmers, scripters and designers that make up the meat and potatoes of what you have come to expect from games. You go into a room, the enemies shoot at you. You rescue the princess, the credits roll. So on, so forth.

This is where the limitations come from. Whilst the Nile delta-like fertile minds of these good men and women come up with some extraordinarily tricksey little hobbits of design and intricacy, there is only so much they can actually do, even if it is the Master part of one of the best games ever. The single player game is limited by the fact that it is just you against the game makers. Your gang versus their gang.

Sure you could repeat the game once finished on a higher difficulty setting, but for most games, there is no thought to the higher difficulty settings. There is nothing new. The enemies just hit you harder, and the hits you do are weaker. Perhaps you will be playing a very rare breed of game and instead of just the perception of making the enemies more accurate, they will actually act differently. Taking cover behind trees. Throwing grenades at you instead of blindly aiming at the floor in front of themselves, which incidentally usually results in very humerus outcomes, and a lot of blood. Who knows, they may even shoot one of their own that is in some way endangering themselves.

If you checked the "Yes" box to the last three statements, the chances are that you are playing Halo.

Not Halo 2, the search for a real ending.

Not Halo 3, the search for more money.

Halo. Halo: Combat Evolved. It was called that because the combat was actually evolved. Do you see what they did there? They evolved it. The combat.

The AI routines were different for every difficulty setting. On easy the grunts grunted and the elite troopers were not really very elite. On Legendary, the games most difficult setting, the elite troopers would shoot their own grunts if they posed a threat, such as retreating back towards their troops once you had landed a sticky grenade onto them.

Halo achieved so well it hurt. Hurt me in my "I can't develop this kind of game in my wildest dreams" gland, which is located somewhere around the foot.

I know people who still to this day take part in Halo LAN parties due to the amount of fun and awesome that this game supplies. It would be wise to note here that Halo has multiplayer. Not online multiplayer, but LAN play only.

Now that I have suitably digressed, we should return to the point in hand. Single player games offer only the wildest practical applications of the games developers minds with a few limited by production deadlines constraints. Multiplayer games give rise to camaraderie, joviality, hilarity and being constantly shot in the face by an ultra-skilled 13 year old German boy who does nothing all day but sit in his bedroom and play the game. Oh, and shoot you.

Multiplayer is where it is at.

'But what of the "Or not always" line you lead with GAME OVER?', I hear you cry in your two's? Well there is always badly made multiplayer. I have had my fair share of this. I will share some of it with you.

Geon: Emoticons
OK, so I may have misspelled the name, but frankly that is the best part of the game. Once you have read the name, further venturing into the world of this game, or worse still playing it, you will possibly loose the will to live more rapidly than Swedes on Midsummer loose their sobriety. I have never heard someone declare a game worse than the regime of Pol Pot until testing this atrocity. They were not wrong though. The huge variety of 4 maps is mind boggling, and the watered down version of Pac-Man this game has surely been derived from pushed game design to it's limits. Before snapping back to square one of the first day of the games design course run by Kellogg's that the designers must have attended. Necessary requirements for the course? A packet of cereal and a pair of scissors to cut out your degree. Get an adult to help.

With a Metacritic score of 59, based on 13 reviews, a lot of "marketing money" must have been spent taking journos out to "Enhance the reviewing process".

I think a possible testament to the game quality can be found in the trailer, linked to above, which features neither in-synch sound or any real information about the game, other than that occasionally you will have "Cube Charged" emblazoned across your screen, perhaps to distract you from what your mind is screaming at you. "LET ME OUT!"

Conflict: Denied Ops
Weighing in with a hefty Metacritic rating of 51, the fifth game in the Conflict series is a startling departure from the previous 4 outings. Now you get half the number of people to play with. Half the options. This is gaming.

When faced with the choice of heavy gunner or sniper, as occurs in this game, for many people I know the choice is already made up. Heavy guns are cool. Big, manly, heavy, sweaty, penis-replacement guns. They kick ass.

This kind of thinking is shored up by many, many, very good games. Conflict: Denied Ops, however is not one of them. When playing multiplayer, as either your sniper or heavy gunner archetype, you will note that the sniper has a definite advantage to his weapon. His sniper rifle, deadly at long range, with one button tap transforms itself into a shotgun. Yes, a shotgun. Just in case you though you could sneak up on him like a spy on a sniper in the seminal Team Fortress 2, remember that he has the best of you at long and short range. This makes the multiplayer basically a snipe-off in every respect. Anyone foolish enough to run around with the shotgun trying to actually have them some fun will find themselves shot at from every direction.

In case you were still in two minds over the quality of the game, which is even worse in single player than in multiplayer, have a look at what two reviewers have to say about it.

Gamernode: This game attempts to fill the cookie cutter FPS mold, but uses dough way beyond expiration. I can think of no good reason to recommend this game to any FPS fans.

GamingExcellence: Denied Ops suffers from abysmal graphics, awful audio, and incredibly low production values.

What I love most about the whole Conflict: Denied Ops idiocy is actually the website. You get to pick your own agent. One, the sniper, is apparently 47, although looks like a man in his late twenties. The other, the heavy gunner, and quite possibly racially profiled into being the black guy, is 28, but looks like a man in his late forties.

How difficult is it to get someones age right to within a decade? These "Denied Ops" must pay out lots of money upon completion for the sniper to be able to afford such good cosmetic surgery for his Dorian Gray style looks.

Games like the above are why I stick to Team Fortress 2. It remains a constant bastion of fun. Like Strongbad, but with guns and interactivity.

Eurovision: Painful Viewing.

2008-05-28T07:24:00.000-07:00

It was with a heavy heart and a sigh of disbelief of what was happening that the TV was turned from stabbing a man in the chest in GTA IV to that most unholy of unholies, the most tortuous event surely to befall Europe since the Spanish Inquisition. The Eurovision Song Contest.

Held in Belgrade, that sunny tourist spot most famous for... Well hosting the Eurovision 2008 song contest.

A musical extravaganza followed, as long as extravaganzas are meant to make you want to rip your eyes from their stalks and crush them under the foot of euro trash, puss heavy and laden with bad song lyrics and worse dance routines exuding from their very cores. It was fair to say that I was not looking forwards to the next few hours.

There were several unremarkable entries. Fortunately I missed the UK's entry, whilst still fixing my optic nerves back together gaffer tape (don't ask about the ears), along with several other Nation's attempts at song, due to my home repair style first aid. This meant I was only to view the last two thirds of the 'competition'. What a two thirds they were. Entirely three quarters too much for my liking, and if 'negative amounts of watching eurovision' were a real currency, I would be on the phone to my non-existent currency dealer to order in my life savings worth.

There were however some points worthy of note. When I say note, I mean the type of note that is so unremarkable, its like being mentioned on a blog that no-one reads entitled "Game Over", or something equally obscure. So here is quite a suitable place really.

Country: Latvia
Artist: Pirates of the Sea
Song: Wolves of the Sea
Placed: 13th

When there is a 75% similarity 'twixt the name of the artist and the song, you know its going to be a rocky ride. There may be more than just a hint of the self titled about it but you have to give them points for trying. Like the kid who always puts his feet in the paint at finger painting class. They tried. One thing Latvia's brave citizens certainly kept in mind when voting for these guys must have been strategy. Their thought process could be summed up thusly.

'Pirates are cool. We have Pirates in our song. People will see that we have pirates and that we must also therefore be cool. This will make us win.'

Latvia, I'm afraid to report, did not win, despite having a Captain Hook. They did however have pirates, which as we all know makes them cool.

Country: France
Artist: Sébastien Tellier
Song: Divine
Placed: 19th

Having a song named after an infamous lady of the night is probably not the best way to go in such family orientated 'entertainment', but that, like never winning a war, is not enough to stop the French. The French are good at one thing worthy of note in this backwater page on the Internet of the future though. That is acquiring cool points. Not the type of online cool points that nerds fight over to determine who is the best video games player, but the type of cool points that exist in the real world and count for something. Cool points that are not an oxymoron. I have made a running total of their score for this years entry.

Actual song which does not induce vomiting: 25 cool points.
5 Bearded lady backing singers: 5 coolpoints each, for a total of 25.
Arriving on-stage in a Golf Cart: 50 cool points.

100 cool points. Count them on your hands and toes if you wish, the maths is irrefutably sound. With 100 cool points you could do anything! Buy a watermelon, raise a feral child or even come 19th in the Eurovision. The possibilities it seems, are limited.

Country: Greece
Artist: Kalomira
Song: Secret Combination
Placed: 3rd

The mindset of the nation of Greece's voters may be equally transparent in strategic terms, due to what can only be described as an unsubtle rip-off of Britney Spears. One would be forgiven for thinking that it is actually Britney Spears. I thought it was a sneaky trick by Greece to hire in the shaven headed mad thing to perform, then make with the old switcharoo backstage and get in the patsy performer to bask in the glory that rightfully belongs to the erstwhile flasher of parts. Apparently, this is not so. Thankfully at that.

Of the song lyrics? Well they are mostly about this particular Spears-a-like's 'secret combination', presumably combination of love, perhaps of chastity belt combination lock, but more likely to be 4 red bull and vodkas in the club, allowing her to become drunk enough to perform on request the dance routine to the un/lucky man she has taken home for the evening. Dirty thing.

Country: Spain
Artist: Rodolfo Chikilicuatre
Song: Baila el Chiki
Placed: 16th

Some things are best left untranslated. The lyrics to this song are such a thing. I do not need to know what they are, I do not care what they are. They would probably loose some of the inherent magic that no doubt was intertwined into them by some sort of 'quill of Mozart' that must have been used to pen them. I made out two lines in the entire song from my less than basic Spanish. El breakidance. El Robocop. Both were accompanied by dancing so fluid and professional it could have been the Royal Ballet and I would not have been able to tell the two apart. My personal favourite of the competition.

Genius. Unadulterated, pure as the driven snow, genius. Any man that carries around a child's guitar strapped over his shoulder like a serious instrument of music has my respect. A man in an obviously unmatched to facial hair Elvis wig? Even better. Combine the two in some unholy trinity along with the skill of playing the guitar with your nose, or perhaps a mismatched waistcoat and shirt, and there is a thing worthy of adoration. Religions would pay for material like that.

Country: Russia
Artist: Dima Bilan
Song: Believe
Placed: 1st

What struck me first about the Russian, and winning, entry was that it was boring and crap.

That perhaps is a little harsh. Harsh on the words boring and crap. To equate them to the Russian entry would be to equate a campfire to a thousand suns. It was a complete non-event. I am sure there are many Russians out there who would disagree. Fortunately none of them read this page. Also, they are wrong.

Enough of the song though, onto the performers.

The violinist. The violinist with the rubber left leg. Perhaps both his legs are rubber, I do not profess to know whether or not he strapped a splint to one of them to give some semblance of being able to remain upright. As you can see from the picture, the trio lost all use of their legs beneath the knee towards the end of the performance. Maybe selling their souls for a rigged turnout eats away at your basic motor neurone control from the ground up. I can only ponder.

The ice skater. An ice skater? I can see they could be mistaken for a dancer, perhaps by the blind. Maybe even by the dead. They were terrible too. A worrying trend with the Russian entry.

The singer was so bland I don't even remember anything about him/her.

One final point though. Since when was Russia in Europe? Is there some false advertising going on here like the World Series in baseball? The world series that coincidentally enough, the USA has won every year, due to other teams not being allowed to compete? Perhaps just plain not giving a damn? Well its worked, because now an entry from outside Europe has won the Eurovision song contest. I hope the blood money was worth it Putin.

GTA IV was switched back to rather hastily.

Buying Booze, The Nordic Way.

2008-05-27T01:25:00.000-07:00

I have written previously about buying alcohol in Sweden, specifically the propensity I have for being refused service at the bar when sober. I thought perhaps a more thorough insight into the insane, yet reassuring social engineering at work here may allay any fears that you, the valued reader may have.

Firstly, allow me to begin with one simple truth. Alcohol is expensive here in Sweden. It is also much more difficult to obtain than in my home country of the UK.

The legal age of consumption here is 20, not 18 as in the UK. ID's are much more prevalent than in the UK. I have even been asked for mine once, at which point I afforded the bouncer a view of my beard, and they promptly let me inside. This legal differential, however, seems to do nothing to quell the underage drinking that modern society seems to pride itself with, see my post about Valborg Day.

Students have it perhaps the best of all. They are not taxed on their alcohol, when bought within the student nations (a nation is basically a student union bar, but with accommodation too). To purchase a student ID (via university enrollment) costs about £30, a must for any travelling alcoholic thinking of staying in Sweden for more than a couple of nights.

Then there is the Volksöl. Literally translated as folks beer, or, beer of the people. This is the beer that you can get at anytime in Swedish supermarkets such as ICA. It is limited in strength to 3.5%. That is the strongest liquor you can purchase anywhere except at the systembolaget (of which more later). 3.5%? I hear you cry in unblemished clamour, "We piss stronger stuff after a night on the tiles" I hear drift over the North Sea. This is true. I tried a "Volksöl six-pack experiment", whereby I drank 6 cans of 3.5% beer. The result? Not much happened except frequent toilet trips to remove 3 litres of new liquid from my system. I'm not sure my liver even noticed it.

Buying booze will inevitably lead you to a club or a pub of some variety. There are many in Sweden, although obviously not as many as in hops loving England. I think the point of no return for my alcohol price realisation was when i realised I had just spent the equivalent of £30 on 3 tequilas and 2 half pints of beer! In the "old man pub" (or wetherspoons as they are more commonly known) near my old London residence, this would have amounted to no more than £7. £8 if it was really good tequila. It was not really good tequila. Most bars will charge around £5 for a half pint of beer. To me this is extortion. To Swedes this is the nature of reality.

Having read the last paragraph, you may be wondering how anyone other than the oracle of omaha could reasonably allow themselves to get drunk without remortgaging. This is where the "pre drinking parties" come into it. In Sweden it is most common to have a group of friends round before the inevitable trip to the club/pub. This is where the majority of the alcohol is consumed, allowing everyone to get reasonably tipsy, before heading out to town for that last couple to tip you over the edge, so to speak. Guitar Hero 1 through 3 are played, smack is talked, challenges are laid down, usually leading to some more Guitar Hero playing and much alcohol is done away with. Where do you get the alcohol? This leads me nicely onto the next paragraph.

The Systembolaget. This translates as the "system company". In reality however, it is the only off license in Sweden. It is state run. This allows the state to employ only trusted people who have a history of not serving minors, generally women in their fifties with short cropped white hair that can see through a fake ID with one glance over their thickly coloured and rimmed glasses, and can reduce underage drinkers to apologetic quivering masses (lesbians). I have seen it happen. I referred them to the beard when questioned. One quick glance at the English translation of the Systembolaget website will perhaps turn your attention to one small detail. They claim to be doing all this restriction and overpricing "without profit motive". I call foul! Tax cannot be seen as a profit motive for some reason now? Is Sweden not really a capitalist state? Has communism run rife in the land of reindeer and polar bears? Probably just the government doing what governments do best.

Misleading, lieing and taxing the people as much as they can get away with.

Regardless, the law also dictates the opening times of this monopoly on off licenses. "Crazy" would not be a word I would immediately associate with them. "Down right ludicrous" would be three. Weekday opening times are variable by an hour either way, but can be summed up as 10am to 7 pm. No late night booze runs available. If you work long hours, forget it and pray for flexitime. Saturdays are no picnic either. They have possibly the shortest hours of any business, that being 10am to 3pm. If you wake up late after a long night out, and are in need of a hair of the dog, you may be out of luck. Sundays do not even see the doors to alcohol land opened.

All this alcohol related chicanery does however actually have a marked improvement on Swedish day to day life. There is little if no alcohol related violence or crime, despite me seeing one tramp smash the face of another with an unopened can of beer just 5 days ago, in broad daylight, outside a shopping centre. The swings and roundabouts sections of playgrounds are, at 3am, not occupied with squads of teen drinkers, hoodies bravely worn, with 2 litre bottles of white lightning strewn across the ground. Programmers perhaps, but not teens.

It makes me happy then, that my company chooses to purchase enough beer to, when frozen, sink the Titanic, once every three Fridays, for general consumption on the premises. HUZZAH!

The Wheelie Bag Conundrum

2008-05-14T12:05:00.000-07:00

We have all been there. Or at least our collective ankles have. Crushed like Judge Doom or Otto 'neath the steam roller. Except those men, comical and comic based, are our ankles, and the steamroller, well, the steam roller is that most detested of nemesis. The wheelie bag. Just thinking about them incenses me toward an inhuman rage, spurred on daily by my encounters with them.

I must state clearly now that I have never owned one. Nor do I intend on ever owning one at any point in my life. Even in my twilight years I expect to retain enough upper body strength and dignity to be able to carry what I need, and indeed, myself. If not then the butler can, or the robot. Or the Robotler.

Perhaps some reasoning at this point would be appropriate instead of mindless vitriol. It should be noted that wheelie bags do have and serve a purpose. Were it not for them, there would be empty landfills and unfinished golf courses the UK over. That would just not do. May hap some history of the wheelie bag should not go untold. A memoir so to speak.

In the UK there is a train station called Clapham Junction. It is claimed to be the busiest in Britain, perhaps even the Local Super Cluster. It is here that my distaste for Satan's hold luggage first manifested itself. There is an overground and an underground walkway at this station, due to the myriad of customers that require to access platforms, leave and arrive. The underground, being on street level, and exit and entrance is logically the smaller, having room for at least seven people abreast. Seven passengers that is, unless just two of them happen to be carrying wheelie bags. It is then wide enough for these two people only, with barely a Planck Length between them. It is at this point, with the flow of foot based traffic flowing both ways like an Algerian lady-boy prostitute with directional disorder, that things start to go awry for the wheelie bag wielder. Unless you follow the laws of irrepressible fact, which dictate that people's ankles get crushed. People like mine.

It is usually at this point that I would start down the claw hammer, black bin liners and hacksaws avenue of thinking. Follow the soon to be departed to their place of wheelie bag residence and do away with a societal pest. Doing good as it were. This cannot be achieved with crushed ankles.

The worst is yet to come. It is not the pain, which is by the way, excruciating. It is the look of annoyance the wheelie bag bearer will, without fail, flash you as if you had contravened the Geneva Convention right there in front of them, affronting their basic nature in some manner. It is surely their right to take up the space of a baby elephant, is it not? Crushing ankles as they go rather than actually having to carry their much valued luggage.

There is light at the end of the tunnel. It is not, however amusing the thought, that wheelie bag purchasers are getting ripped off. Their much prized travelling companions are triple the price of standard luggage, or something that has no wheels. My duffel bag, £39. The same range's wheelie bag, but with less volume, £129. HA! That is not the light. The light emanates from the shed at the end of my garden. The one I do "those" experiments in. There is a wheelie bag devourer in there. It is similar to wheelie bags, so that it may blend in with its potential victims, like a wolf in sheep's clothing, except that it has blades that come out of the wheels as if it were a Byzantine chariot. Boadicea ain't got nuttin' on me.

Turklish

2008-05-06T11:04:00.000-07:00

There are myriad places 'ponst this Internets we call home that one can visit to see the amusing results of cultures colliding. The integration of two different peoples attempting to work towards some common goal. In my experience, this common goal is capitalist in nature, specifically profiteering from ones fellow man.

No greater humour can be derived for this desperate scrabble for sprilla than when one culture, say that of Turkey, or more specifically Istanbul, seeks to extract as much of it as possible from it's English visitors. Visitors such as myself.

Where could such humour lie GAME OVER? I hear you cry, or at least post in the comments section were I to gaze into my crystal ball of foretelling (+4). In the menu's, you ocelot of Internet information seekers, I reply.

It is with heavy heart that I come to the realisation that I may never be again, able to order a Turbo Fish. Such a fish could surely never be caught with a mere rod and line. Some superluminal device would be needed if nothing else, to entrap such a mythical being. Simply to obey Newtons laws of conservation of momentum you understand.

Freunh Fries similarly have a touch of the fabled about them. Being only 2 Turkish Lira, perhaps it could contain more awesome than even I am able to endure. I did not dare order them, lest the Freunh civilisation took some grievance to my careless slaughter of their fries. Whatever they were.

The Steved Fish. Could it belong to a Steve? Has it previously belonged to an appropriately named person? Perhaps the fish was self titled by the discoverer, although EOL gives no clues as to it's binomial nomenclature. Some sort of personalisation carried right through to the menu itself? Maybe it has been through some clandestine operation and process that would turn it into a Steve. The kind that drives a car best reserved for the back lanes of Essex.

If all of the above is not enough to fill you to brimming, then I urge you in the strongest possible terms to head to the Cuancan restaurant in Sultanahmet, and wash it all down with an ice cold refreshing glass of Spite. One letter of difference, a world of meaning.

Valborg Day

2008-05-05T10:34:00.000-07:00

In Sweden, Valborg Day is also called Labour Day. It just so happens that this is the day that the King Carl Gustaf the ninteymillionth celebrates his birthday. Good for him I say. He could even pretend that the literally millions of people out and about during the first half of the day are out celebrating his birth. They are not.

Valborg Day is actually Walpurgis night. A pagan festival which sees the witches in their various covens convene with all the lands set aglee. Bonfires are burned, firecrackers are cracked. It's like Faust, but with more IKEA stores in the back ground.

People get it going early on Valborg day. Walking down the road to the center of town I helped no less than three groups of teen drinkers desperately attempting to prise the lid from their Smirnoff Ice's with keys out with the old lighter trick. The sun was shining, the crowds were out. Max burger, the national equivalent of McDonald's, even had a Valborg Day meal. In fact, the good men and women manning the 12 ft service counter were probably the only people working city-wide. Except for me. There were 20 of them, one would take orders, the person stationed behind them retrieving items and fussing over the details. Of the meal? Well, it came with ailoi. Not something one would expect for a McDonald's rip-off. I hear they are doing Saffron infused burgers for midsummer day.

The sight that would next greet my eyes would rip my views of the world asunder. My very core was challenged. An Emo. Not a goth, although the two are easily confused, but an Emo. Wearing what can only be described as a smile. Even Emo's can have a happy Valborg Day apparently. Shame that.

Of the rest of Valborg Day, well, drinking takes up a large part of it. Drinking and more drinking. There is something called a champagne race. They basically lock about 400 students inside a building, with bands playing throughout the day. Champagne is dirt cheap for this one evening of fun. I say evening, its a day really. They get locked in by 2pm. Then they all buy a bucket load of champagne and basically spray each other with it. Winning podium style. For 12 hours.

Then there is more drinking. Like an average Saturday in the UK if you are still want for a mental image.

Starbreeze > Eidos

2008-04-21T13:35:00.001-07:00

Apologies for the break in normal service, but several people have been bugging me asking what it's like in the land of the vikings, so for their amusement and general satisfaction, yet more for my sense of apathy, or what I deign to call "effective time management via grouping similar communications towards a common end point", I have created this post about the basic differences between my previous employer Eidos, now the subject of rampant take-over bids having lost somewhere in the region of 90% of their share value in six months, and my current employer Starbeeze, who seem to embody the word "AWESOME". Capitals intended.

Unfortunately, and with delicious ironings, Eidos' firewall blocks near every entertainment site, including the videogame sites it product populates in such sparse quality, along with my "humorous linked images". Presumably so the completely redundantified QA department cannot find out any more about their impending cheques. Which incidentally the QA dept found out about on the internet anyway. Way to go management. You have done it yet again.

So, onto the meat of the subject matter. I will do a short header for each chapter on the various points of difference 'twixt the two and yadda yadda yadda, I can't do tables.

Approachability.
At Eidos, there was the Xmas do once a year, and the "summer fun day out". Both were offered up as some sort of social interchange whereby the whelps and peons of the company would be sat at a table with at least one person from the board of directors, who would do their level best to ask you your name, then promptly ignore you for the rest of the evening until it came round to the time when they wanted some drugs. Said drugs would be supplied by the peons and whelps, not because they were enamoured with the overly reaching and amazing organisation of the choice of games signed and the fantastic management style, especially due to the fact that they were paid so little they could barely afford the drugs themselves, more over fear that they would be left out in the cold, come promotion day, and perhaps in the vain hope that the director at that moment plundering their stash with the appetite of a rhino on heat would perhaps remember them the next time. This would be the only time you would ever see a member of the board.

At Starbreeze I see the CEO everyday. They even eat with the equivalent of peons and whelps. Which is a non-existent issue there anyway. If I ever want to talk to someone, they are more than willing to listen, no matter how much of the company they own.

Equipment.
At Eidos, and indeed, SCi before it, it took the better part of 5 years to acquire what at the time was seen as an average spec machine. I had a dual core. Count the cores. On your fingers. 5 Years to attain what was basically a average spec machine, with the proviso that it was for the duration of the project alone. Let alone what my actual needs were. I also had two monitors. One of them was a 14" thing from the dawn of flat screen monitors. The other was a standard CRT. The 14" thing was broken, you could never turn it on or off unless you had a hatpin to hand, which lets face it, is about as rare as a hot girl in a room of programmers. It ran Vista.

At Starbreeze I arrived to find something wonderful waiting for me. It hovered. It was from the future. It had 64-bit XP. I knew that it was just a couple of silver steps and star charts away from being Max from Flight of the Navigator. I pressed the hallowed keys of PC-Discovery, Dxdiag, and awaited my pleasures. 8 cores. 8. 4GB of RAM and a GFX card that wasn't only pixel shader 2 compatible. Half a Terabyte of disk space. Two 24" flat screen monitors, and a 1080p HDTV. For those of you that have no idea what all this PC jargon is, it was the equivalent of leaving a basic tool using culture in the Mesozoic and emerging in the present day, iPhone in hand and Blackberry in the other.

Suggestability.
At Eidos, were you to come up with an amazing idea for the game you were currently working on, you were told to, only after significant persistence on your part, not encouraged, to file it in the bug tracking database under the class of "D". In a normal Developer-Publisher relationship, the Developer would not even be able to see the bugs labelled D, as it was seen as a distraction away from the obvious awesome the game already embodied, no matter how good the suggestion was.

At Starbreeze, I am told, not encouraged, to make my opinions known immediately upon receiving the information from my brain. Programmers come up to me and actively ask me what they can possibly do to make the game better. Every metacritic point helps as they say. Within a week of one of them coming to me, my suggestion was implemented and adding a certain something to the game. I'm not saying it's made it the be all and end all of video games, but it's certainly helped it towards something resembling that.

I wonder if Eidos know that every metacritic point does actually help, or if they are just blithely hoping Lara will save the day? Again...

The Freebies.
When employed at Eidos, it was company policy for everyone to get a copy of the game that they were working on. Once it was released obviously. Similarly there was no way they would give you something you could sell either. Every copy came with the dreaded "Promotional Copy, NOT FOR RESALE" stamped in bold type across the disk and Box Art too. Not that that particularly mattered to people on Ebay, what with that apparently making it "Super rare publisher only copy" worth approximately 4 bodily limbs and someone else's heart. Also there would be the odd T-Shirt giveaway, from the mountains of cotton they had printed for PR purposes for a game everyone had forgotten from 3 years ago and they couldn't feasibly fob off on the unsuspecting public disguised as a competition prize giveaway. The games were of similar age.

The Starbreeze list could go on for a while. There is the same copy of each game given to everyone. That's the kicker though. Everyone. At Eidos, you only got a copy if you worked on the game. At Starbreeze, you even get a copy if your the cleaner, and you never even saw the game. They are real copies too. Not something that you have to sell electronically, but something were I to so wish it, that could be sold at the local Game. Not that the Game store in Wimbledon ever complained about the promotional copies. Then there are the same mountains of free cotton. They do, however, take the form of quality goods as opposed to T-shirts. Then there are copies of '"other games the publisher is working on". If our publisher was say, Eidos, we would get some copies of the next Tomb Raider. Thankfully it is not.

Then there is the free breakfast. Every morning. I have not paid for breakfast once since being in this country. Not once. An entire third of my food bills left to history. Then there is the free fruit. As much as you can eat. I can eat a lot. Then there are the free Swedish lessons. Two hours a day, two days a week. 50% off gym membership. More social days out than I would care to remember, the last being a great trip to the Technical Museum in Stockholm. Training seminars out the caboose. The last of those being only two weeks ago. Free beer on Fridays. Not every Friday mind you, only once every three weeks, but considering the abortive price of alcohol in this land, you take what you get given and are thankful for it. I certainly am. There are snacks too, and now the office has been moved, the view is not entirely displeasing either. Quite enjoyable with a case of Staropramen of a Friday evening.

The office move also threw up a lot of free things at Starbreeze, something which SCi, when moving into the Wimbledon Bridge House office, made sure was not available. A mate of mine even got a large 4 seater leather sofa. Cheap as free. That is enough free for now. There is so much more, like the massage once a month, or the choice of office chair without prior back problem, that I would risk boring you/incensing you with jealous rage.

The View.
In Eidos we were offered this lovely view. I'm sure you can agree that it is second to none.

None that is, were only other buildings in the world to not exist, and no-one have any eyes. Which unfortunately they do, and they do. In that order. I now enjoy, whilst taking my free breakfast, this vista. Now go ahead and blow that image up with your mouse. It looks much better trust me. Also it's much better now it's getting summery, and ice cream is a requirement on one of the many balcony tables we enjoy.

The Games.
Really this is what separates the boys from the men, or more precisely, Eidos from Starbreeze. At Eidos, it certainly seemed like they would sign any old shit. Some of the games were in such dire states upon arriving at my desk, that they would need another couple of years extra development time just to have a hope of passing the stringent certification processes laid down like law by Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony. Eidos were whores. Anything they could get their dirty little mitts one was fair game. IP was ruined. Nothing was sacred.

Then we have Starbreeze, who just recently turned down a franchise that would be successful even if we were to fart in a box and put it on the shelves. The name alone would sell it. We said no. Why? Because we were asked whether or not we wanted to make the game. No-one did. We just didn't like the style the game had, so we left it alone. People at Starbreeze come up with ideas for games and they get made if the ideas are good, not because there was a decent movie once upon a time 20 years ago and we suddenly have the IP. Not that the game is in any way based on the movie, or any of the characters in it.

What conclusions to draw? Well the title pretty much sums it up. Eidos have embodied the word fail in the past two years, with naught but Pony Friends being of any merit. Starbreeze cannot simply help but suceed. Perhaps something to do with not hiring itdiots, or signing shit. Who knows. Well, I do. Which is why I am where I am.

The Great Swedish Haircut Con

2008-04-10T12:09:00.000-07:00

Walking around with long hair is not for the faint of heart. There are many trials and tribulations that you must face. These could be anything from reverse-engineering honey to form an organised bee hive replete with workers, larvae, drones and a queen, to attempting construct a sixty foot mechaniod from naught but an orange, Stilton rind and a banana with more than 70% black skin coverage. As a person with long hair you should fall into one of four distinct categories:

1) You are a metal-head. Like Sepultura? Need Max Cavalera in your day to day and wake up with thoughts of Mike Patton ringing around your subconscious like a moth on speed trapped in the safety lamp of your mind? You probably have long hair. You probably even enjoy the odd head banging session when frequenting the newest, dingiest, cheap pintiest(?) club that deigns to employ bouncers in sufficient quantity to take care of the raging excesses of testosterone this musical style conjures in it's devotees.

2) You are a programmer. Like the downtime compiling gives? Take something away from xkcd that no-one else around you seems to? You probably knew "Hello World" before you could walk and dissected your Speak & Spell to get to the voice synthesiser for the purposes of creating your own robotic clone. C is a language, not a letter.

3) You are Jesus. Have problems with the taxman? Need to get better friends? You are a cosmic Jewish zombie that is his own father and can make others live forever if they symbolically eat your flesh and receive telepathic communications from people accepting you as their saviour and master, allowing you to remove an evil force that resides in the soul of humanity as a result of a rib-woman who became utterly convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.

4) You are female.

Group 4, comprising half the world, is surely the largest. In fact there are actually more than half. They have been fighting with the other half to get treated the same for a while now. Sometimes though, they can take it too far. Hence my title.

In Sweden, as it takes so long to cut a girls hair, the male hairdressing salons are required, by law, to up their prices so as to make the amount paid by either sex similar, despite not upping the quality of work or the length of time worked. This follows somewhat the interests of fair pricing, and that any hairdresser would never specialise in men's hair as they can charge women an extra bodily appendage.

If you want a short back and sides, and you happen to be a man, do away with thoughts of the £4 haircut that you got in the barbers just off the Tooting High Street. Here it is a full 250 Swedish Crowns, or about £22. For a styling, it will be nearer £50 and for the cutting of a girls hair? Well suffice to say it is probably more thrifty to book a flight to Heathrow, the £6 Oyster travel card to Tooting, and some extra cash for one of the fine "Ladies Salons" that grace this particular enclave of London. Hell you could even get go0sed for £12 at the same time.

In short, I suppose I shall have to grow my hair and become one of the 4 groups above, preferably number 3.

Getting Served in Sweden

2008-04-06T04:14:00.000-07:00

From the title of this post you may automatically think that a member of the Swedish youth strolled up to me on the street and served me some piping hot B-Boy break dancing antics fresh from his or her repertoire of skills. This, however, is not the case, not only because had they attempted such I would have reacted like Junior to a whack youth who be chattin' bare breeze 'bout me and my homelies not being able to do press ups, but also because to those that know me well, will know for certain that I would be attempting to get served. Nay demanding such. Which as happy coincidence I was. At a local bar.

Now being English, there is a certain quantity I am able to imbibe before I become perceivably tipsy, or for that matter drunk. Coming from a long, distinguished, line of alcoholics, makes the quantity increase, as does my 10 years as a practising alcoholic. Imagine my surprise then, after 3 pints (at a shocking £5 each) of Staropramen and a singular shot of Tequila, I was refused service at the bar for being obviously over the limit. At this point, I should perhaps mention the fact that Tequila is like water to me, a necessary part of everyday life. Cue amazed staring at the bar staff. Had she made some sort of mistake? Was she talking to the person behind me? Was it because I had asked her "Could you please give me the most Scotch you are legally allowed to pour into one glass"? I will never know. What I do know though is that Swedish people think this turn of events hilarious and will not stop telling you such.

What to do, what to do. Should I attempt to get everyone on their feet and moved to another bar in some sort of protest? Perhaps storm out in a blaze of glory and solitarily acquire a new drinking den further up the river, where they would not know how much alcohol I had had, and would be more likely to serve me. No. I shall stay here and weather my humiliation like any Brit worth his or her salt, and weather it i did. By allowing the people I was with to buy me a couple more more drinks.

When 2am rolled around and it was time to leave, at last i felt that warm glow of being somewhat tipsy. Finally I had reached the Valhalla that the bar staff though I merited about 4 hours previously. As we left the bar, I walked up to the bar and asked the barmaid, purely in the interests of professional curiosity, having been on the other side of the bar in my time, exactly what the law concerning this was. Not to be able to better observe the law, but more to be able to avoid the consequences more efficiently and further my drinking habit. She explained that it is purely a personal preference thing, and if the bar staff don't want you drinking anymore, then you cannot drink any more. There is no hard and fast rule of say 3 units of alcohol. She then told me with a completely straight face to my tipsiness.

"You look fine now though, I could serve you if you wanted, but you're leaving."

Flabberghasted.