2012

The exclusive scene they released for 2012 is weird. The responses of the actors don't at all seem to match up to the CGI going on around them.

Inside the vehicle it's like they're having a fun, japey adventure while outside the vehicle hundreds of thousands of people are dying in a horrific natural disaster.



The new widescreen format doesn't sit well with the design fo this blog.

How Racist Are You? (The answer is very)

If you ever want to waste an hour of your life, watch channel 4's The Event: How Racist Are you? It consists of a reproduction of a famous 1960's psychological experiment, the method of which goes as follows:

• Get a group of volunteers. Put them in a room.
  
• Separate the volunteers into two groups - those with blue eyes and those with brown eyes.
• Get an obnoxious bitch to shout abuse at both groups for 10 hours until the brown-eyed people are prejudiced towards the blue-eyed people.
• Point a finger at the brown-eyed people and shout "Ah HA! RACISTS!".

As a demonstration on the prevalence of racism in society it's already shit, but even worse is that it doesn't even work. Not once in the 10 hours does anybody in the group even express anything racist. The closest they get is one mention of the word 'golliwog'.

Seemingly in desperation, the psychologists decide to interpret the actions of the volunteers who refuse to take part in enforced racism and leave as evidence that they're racists.

If the volunteers leave, they're racist.
If the volunteers stay and be racist, they're racist.
Nice falsifiable hypothesis, assholes.

It ends with the obnoxious, miserable bitch looking absolutely sour-faced because the brown-eyed people didn't start violently whipping the blue-eyed people and sending them to work in the fields like she wanted them to.

And she's clearly the most racist person in the room: "All white people are racists." Christ. Psychologists are plucking idiots.

Three things

1) It seems difficult to find a t-shirt these days which isn't daubed with nonsensical text and shapes, skulls, names of sports teams that nobody has heard of, or the word Osaka.

2) I'm behind on my novelty, internet-purchased t-shirt quota.

3) If anybody wants anything buying from the Valve merchandise site, now is the time to say so. You have 24 hours, starting now.

On the death of Patrick Swayzee...

At the rate at which celebrity deaths are becoming more and more relevant to me, it can't be many years before fate takes away an actor that I actually care about.

Over exposed

On a related note, I don't think I do get headaches from talking to women; I think it's just the fact that I've been wearing glasses more, which aren't really intended for viewing things at close range.

Though this implies that I only make eye contact with women; or that I'm exceptionally leery and in-their-face.

Not that I get headaches from talking to women or nothing.

All aboard the Psychotropic Gyroscope

So whilst tilting the head back appears to give me brief feelings of euphoria, tilting the head forward after exercise has a reasonable chance of causing a brief, passing headache. Further avenues of investigation consist of orienting the head left, right, and upside down.

I think I'll wait until completing neuroanatomy before trying upside down though.

Edit: There's a module available for this unit simply titled 'Pain'. Sure glad I'm not taking that.

I much prefer Human Reproduction lolololol

Fascinating Insights into the World of Science

The Welcome Trust Building has a pippette clinic where you can take your pippetes to be serviced.

GTFOO my IT facilities

Either the number of freshers admitted this year has drastically increased or I've just aged, making a larger fraction of the University populace appear youthful and fresher-like.

Whichever it is, I can't be having with it. Not more obnoxious freshers and certainly not the process of aging.

And another thing...

In Avatar, if they have the technology to detect all brain activity and transfer it, in real time, into a different brain, how have they not cured paralysis yet. I'd imagine that it's easier to transfer the nerve impulses required to walk a few centimetres down a damaged spinal cord than it is to transfer the nerve impulses required to walk and have sex with aliens a few miles into a different body.

My money is on the Wolfman

VS

Crapability

The previous post has taught me not to judge too quickly, which is a lesson I learn roughly every two days. With my crap ability to predict the future in mind fo, I think it's best to put a little sign on my preemptive Avatar review saying 'It will probably be good'.

The Host

I think I was wrong about The Host. What I mistook for a jaunty pace was actually the author's eagerness to get the plot out of the way and force the main character into a inescapable, confined space with her boyfriend and a bunch of survivors so that they can all talk and cry and talk and cry and threaten to kill her and cry and talk and talk and plant crops and cry and talk.

The breakdown has been:
100 pages of plot
200 pages of cave/talking

It's taught me that women love to have their heads manouvered about by hands on their chins fo.

"The acronym RING stands for Really Interesting New Gene. Hurr hurr hurr."

The reason cancer hasn't been cured yet is because fucking stupid scientists spend most of their time coming up with shitty acronyms that help nobody, especially not people who have to go running off to find internets to look up what a RING domain is because the acronym explains fuck all.

The humans are dead; love lives on

If not judging a book by its cover can be extended to not judging a book by the name of the author on its cover, or their previous work, or the film adaptations of their previous work, I think I can get away with buying and reading The Host, by Stephenie Meyer, the lady what did the Twilight Saga.

It hasn't been bad sofar, despite having the same basic formula as Twilight - the idea that a mind-reading monster can be tamed by the love of a good woman below the age of consent with a unique mind who pointedly isn't having sex with an older man liable to brutality kill her at any moment (although, this time, set against the backdrop of an Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers-style alien invasion). The science fiction parts tide me over and the heart-stoppingly awkward acts of sexual frustration do a very good job at making the post-apocalypse seem ten times more horrific.

The main downside is that it appears to be the plot of Avatar flipped, and with the 'stop destroying nature' moral replaced with a 'stop killing each other' moral, which the aliens espouse every other page as an excuse for wiping out mankind. It's no less tiring a moral though.

Anywho, this is the last time I boast about enjoying something womanish and stupid, as it's starting to look smug.

YAY WORGENS

Alex.

It's more beautiful than you ever dreamed.

"I thought one less freerunner in the world would be a good thing"

For the second time in two days, I've had to walk past teenagers practicing what I think was parkour, though the walls in both cases were around waist height. It's good that they're getting exercise, I suppose, but they were going about it with such smug looks on their faces that I understand why traceurs always seem to find themselves being chased by people with guns.

Faux pastry

People in perfect physical health need to stop making lie-jokes about their bodies around me, as it turns out that I'm as useless at judging when somebody is making a self-derogatory untruth for the purpose of humour as I am at visually judging BMI or other health indicators.

If they stop saying 'I'm in bad shape' when they don't mean it, then I'll stop blindly agreeing with them in the sudden hope that we can both go jogging together, unintentionally offending them in the process.

Everything old is blue again

The fact that James Cameron's James Cameron's Avatar by James Cameron is frequently described as the most anticipated film of 2009 is pretty depressing, as it's probably true. It looks dumb. I guess I'm just a little tired of the moral: 'Be kind to nature (because it has bioluminescence or you can have sex with it).'

Not even that. We all know to be nice to nature by now. We also all know that subjugating a primitive alien race with massively superior technology is a bit of a dick move. I think we've outgrown these parables.

Also, the Na'vi aren't even aliens - they're clearly just stereotypical African tribespeople coloured blue. And the story is Pocahontas. And if the conflict between the Na'vi and the humans isn't resolved through the love between Jake Sully and Neytiri then the world has become a strange and unknown place to me.

TBH I'd rather just watch a group of Draenei roleplaying in Zangarmarsh for an hour, or FernGully: the Last Rainforest.

Haaronstone Ford

Like mismatched jigsaw pieces, I've been trying to hammer together Han Solo and Aaron Stone ever since noticing that they share a vague physical similarity.

It hasn't been a productive exercise.

Give HeaD this christmas

So Zavvi is now HeaD, and I can't imagine why, except that they got carried away with a marketing campaign that they'll never be able to overtly use. And that it sounds funky.

The funky was in massive sarcasm quotes.

Edit: Sorry, clearly 'Head to HeaD' is also a possible marketing campaign.

I think its middle pedal (?)

The dream where I find myself at the wheel of a speeding car without any driving experience, usually being pursued by police, has officially become a recurring one. It probably stems from the fear that my life is going nowhere, recently agitated by languishing in an empty flat for two weeks, though I've yet to have a dream where I find myself in a job without the proper training or in a relationship without having done whatever you're supposed to do before entering into a relationship.

Hopefully the driving dreams will go away once I actually learn how to drive. At the least, I'll know how to brake.

The key word is indulgent

I'd like to recommend never going anywhere near Braid, but I can't as I don't know if it's crap. The vast majority of the internet thinks that it's the greatest game ever, so I'm forced to concede through force of numbers that it must be a good game.

So all I can to do is analyze why I suffered such a massive allergic reaction to it.

1. I approached it looking for faults.

2. I started at three in the morning, perfectly sober, when ideally I should have started it late in the evening, quite drunk.

3. Braid tries really hard to be arty, and thus I responded to it in the same way I do to quite a lot of art i.e. derision and disgust. I don't like to be jerked about too much when it comes to narrative, yet Braid is indulgently obscure. Fragments of story are revealed in chronologically mismatched and unavoidable chunks of text segregated away from the rest of the game at the beginning of every level, which read like teenage poetry and convey the general feeling that the writer, Mr Johnathan Blow, thinks he has an idea for a story so great that he refuses to share it with anybody, but wants everybody to know how great the thing he isn't telling them is.

Or he believes there's something inherently deep and mysterious about failing to tell a story.

IT'S NOT HARD TO FAIL TO TELL A STORY.

Fortunately, it turns out that all this text has little-to-nothing to do with the main plot anyway (a simple story of a man searching for a princess), and merely serves as filler until the final act's twist, where the truth is shockingly revealed - [SPOILER] that you are a mentally-unbalanced stalker rapist nuclear scientist and the princess is a nuclear bomb. Or something.[/SPOILER]

Which is garbage.

There's nothing wrong with ambiguous endings but it's clearly just pure garbage. A garbage ending built on a garbage middle and garbage start. You can try to interpret some sense into the garbage but ultimately you won't get anything more out of it than what you put in, and frankly you shouldn't be doing the author's job for him.

It's such a shame that the knobby pretentiousness drags down the reasonable time-manipulation puzzles, especially as I spent ten pounds on the flipping thing.

Also, any comparisons to Portal are completely unfounded. While Portal takes a simple, new concept and has a lot of fun with it, Braid takes an ancient time-control mechanic and then confounds the player by massively complicating it with arbitrary, fiddly rules. The only similarity between the two games is their short length, which in Braid's case is a blessing.

I'm pretty tired and miffed so I apologize if this post doesn't make a lot of sense. Also for the swearing.

Good juror

I've been called up by Her Majesty's Courts Service for jury duty.

Double helpings of justice for everyone.

Society for the Royal Pulverizing and Crushing of Arachnids

Ding dong. The spider that's been haunting my room for nearly a week is dead, crushed under a hard-back copy of Michael Crichton's Prey, may God rest his soul. MC's that is, not the spider's. Sleep deprivation from a week of terror has left me incapable of feeling remorse.

Not that I'm proud of it. It's marks the first time I've intentionally used these hands for killing.

But perhaps I speak too soon - there's no body to be found underneath the book, only a bloodstain on the skirting board. It's probably still clinging to life, sustained only by it's need for vengeance. While not a hateful man, I sortof hope it bleeds to death.

Welcome to the layer cake, Harry

Two reasons why I like L4yer Cak3:

One: The only major romance scene in the film is cut short by punching the guy in the stomach and bundling him into a sack. I'm building a distaste towards any scene of kissing or canoodling these days, which have the effect of driving my movie experience into a brick wall.

Two: It has Dumbledore using the f-word.

On a very much related note, here is a flow chart of the plot. I was quite proud of how concise I got it, though it's a single, giant spoiler.

What is this emotion you call Wimbledon?

It's quite endearing to see so many grown men and women so excited by a electronically-closing roof, though I couldn't help but feel the tennis players were getting a little overshadowed by it (fucking puns). Poor Dinara Safina spent a few hours beating an absolute man-mountain of a Frenchwoman, only to be asked what she felt about the new roof around five times.

Nobody seemed to care that she'd won, or that Orlando Bloom had clearly snuck into the ladies' singles tournament disguised as a woman.

Grrrrrr

That being said, the trivial, unrelated aspects of sports events are handy for giving people like me a chance to appear as though we know something about sport, which I don't. TBH I've mostly just been watching the ball boys.

There's some really bad ball boys, especially outside of center court. This one guy charged about court like Marcus Fenix and kept fumbling the ball, stopping, and charging back the other way. It was painful to watch.

So yeah... That's everything I know about tennis.

One Million Years B.C. drinking game

Drink every time:
- A name is said
- A spear or rock completely fails to make contact with it's intended target
- Someone falls down a hole

Newsworthy

It seems strange that I stopped blogging because I'd nothing left to say and then start again to talk about a 10-year-old beating me at Mario kart.

But he beats me at Wii Fit too. It's darn serious.

A black hole of fun

The youth of today and their computer games...

One of the children that my mum childminds has gotten into Mario Kart Wii something serious, and it's sickening to watch.

He's very good. Some would say too good. He'd got gold in absolutely everything, save the mirror cup. But he plays it with shocking ignorance of Mario's long history, the lore of the mushroom kingdom through which he's driving, or the vast catalogue of characters.

In fact, it's not even clear why he plays it, as he doesn't show any noticeable emotion whether he wins or loses. When I lose playing against a normal human being, I can take solace in the belief that the average level of happiness in the world has been kept more or less the same by my opponent's happy vicroey. Not so against this soulless robot. You can feel the mean world happiness level sink just a little bit every time he wins.

And certainly he's too young to enjoy the delights of Peach's upskirt bloomer-shots (admittedly rare in the fast-paced world of kart racing).

He just plays it because he was built and sent back to the year 2009 to play it.

Environmentalist zombies

You know what really grinds my gears? People who want to save the rainforests. And by save the rainforest I mean they recycle a jar every now and again. And by recycle I mean they leave the jars next to the sink, neither rinsing them or taking them to the recycling bin.

It's like an empty gesture of an empty gesture, and it always falls to muggins here to actually follow through with the deed.

I can live on bread and cheese

It's the end of week 1 of the Easter Holidays and my mental state is holding up fairly well. I've not been talking to myself, just laughing and singing to myself slightly louder than normal.

Though I have been singing Anything You Can Do, which may appear to the outside observer that I am talking to myself.

The only major difference is the mood swings caused by the vast amounts of sugar and caffeine required to sustain revision for any length of time. There's already been blog posts grumbling about, among other things, women that type too fast, librarians with baggy trousers and people who hold hands, that were scrapped upon realising that I was just very angry from plummeting sugar levels.

P.S. For those so inclined, here is a video of Envy and Greed having a Anything You Can Do sing-off:

Idiots are amaaazing

One quote that I've never been able to figure out is Arthur C Clarke's:

'It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value. '

Both on a individual level (i.e. the ability to hit somebody over the head with a stick) and on a species-wide level (i.e. space travel/planetary colonisation) the quote is demonstrably proven wrong, and it seems strange that a science fiction writer would say something that sounds so much like anti-intellectualism.

I'm like the Ministry of Truth

I need to stop watching and judging people from my window when I'm tired and angry. For starters, it's creepy, and I've already annoyed one aggressive Irish woman doing that.

Thanks to Jamie (but mostly to Vundofix.exe)

So the virus infestation has been expunged. It was simply a case of dealing with it as one would a snake - cut off the vundo and the body dies.

Anything that wants to get through now has to deal with windows firewall, AVG, and Spyware doctor, so I'm pretty confident this won't happen again.

Now if only I could get Team Fortress 2 to work :(

Norton makes me feel good

This PC is now infested with trojans and adware to the point where everything is noticeably slower, pop-ups are appearing for the first time in years, and the hard drive is making a constant rhythmic chirping noise.

I've run virus scan after virus scan, but all the trojans it deletes and all the hundreds of cookies it sends to the "virus vault" keep returning. Whatever and wherever this vault is, there's either a huge hole in the bottom or it's rapidly filling up with multiple copies of dangerous cookies.

I keep getting visions of that Ghostbusters episode where the containment unit fails and the whole city goes to hell.

All aboard the Ego bathroom

Does anybody else have this thing where if you stand in a bathroom with wet hands and put the wet hands over your face and tilt your head back, you get a strange sensation of extreme power?

I'm not sure if the bathroom or the wet hands are necessary components. It's probably just that I'm usually in the bathroom with wet hands on my face in the morning, very soon after going from horizontal to vertical, and that tilting the head back just exacerbates the messed up flow of blood to the head.

The end result being feelings of Godhood.

WoW RPG GM RulBk

The World of Warcraft Tabletop Roleplay Game is pretty dumb. It's clearly just Dungeons and Dragons with a thin sheen of Warcraft sprayed over it. Eg:

Arcane Missile, first level mage spell, deals 1d4+1 damage.

vs

Magic Missile, first level wizard spell, deals 1d4+1 damage.

They don't bother even changing most of the other spells' names.

Also, there's a spell called 'Bladestorm' where 'your arms become magical longswords.' That's just stupid, and clearly not a storm.

If I hadn't obtained it through illegal download, I'd be feeling pretty gypped by now.

Some corner of a foreign field

I kindof feel like performing some nationalistic counter-graffiti. Does anybody knows where one can find several quarts of white and red paint?

Just need to wait to see if they intend to do anything with the outline of Scotland before filling it in with St George's Cross.

I spy from on high

There's a large outline of Scotland (or a man in a hat) drawn in orange paint on the grass outside my window. It's fun watching people pause as they walk over it and slowly realise what it is.

It was especially enjoyable watching a man in overalls stop and stare at it with a look of 'damn students, I bet I'll be the one cleaning this up', as it was two grown-men in overalls who put it there in the first place. It look them hours.

I'm sure a couple of drunk student could have done it in five minutes.

Pathetic Domestic Arguments

Some flatmate keeps moving my bacon from the bottom shelf of the fridge to the middle shelf. We seem to have developed a minor shelf-war.

Raw meat goes on the bottom shelf for a reason, especially if it's two weeks old and from lidl, as it reduces the risk of it contaminating other food.

I could take a wild guess as to who is doing it, as the food that appears on the bottom shelf is invariably pasta-based.

I've considered sticking a post-it saying 'RAW MEAT GOES ON BOTTOM SHELF' on the door, but that's one of those minor things that tend to set the ball of flat-hate rolling. So this is me being the bigger man. Sortof...

The bigger man who no longer cares if his Italian flatmate contracts food poisoning.

I've been calling her Crandall!

It's only just come to my attention that it's pre-rog-a-tive, not per-og-a-tive. This is almost as bad as the banal mix-up.

The Sandman Saga

The Sandman now causes stunned targets to take 50% less damage whilst stunned, making it not only annoying for the stunee, but also annoying for the stunner's team, who's attacks are rendered half as effective.



This really makes no sense within the internal logic of the game, and it's bizarre how Valve seem to be piling up the negative effects to make the thing balanced, whilst making it even less useful.

And then I watch the consequences that occur therein, subject and verb

If you're ever in need of a laugh, check out the Duncan and Jordanstone School of Fine Art's 2008 degree show, featuring some genuinely quite good artists and some highest-caliber baloney.

They blur so many boundaries it's surprising that existence hasn't been rendered a brown smudgy mess. I guess we're just lucky they're defining boundaries at the same pace.

I particularly liked Stuart McAdam's minimalist approach; it really makes you think:

ff – ss ( ) pih – bih

Sound ( ) Image

Place ( ) Non-Place

You know what really grinds my gears

People who think that their opinion on a film in a franchise is more legitimate because they haven't seen the previous installments and thus are free of any expectation or bias.

From the dryest city in Scotland

'It never rains in Dundee' is something I've repeated to the extent of cliche. I miss rain.

So here are 5 good rain sound videos, in rough order of mild to strong.


Spring rain or mountain steam.


Nice, though potentially too much splash. Contains mild thunder.


More consistent rainfall, with more powerful, sustained thunder.


Intense water-on-water action, with thunder.


A full-blown holophonic thunder-storm, with satisfying thunder peals.

The Something of Boris

I recently downloaded and watched through Quantum of Solace. It's not necessarily a bad film, but it's laden with hundreds of minor flaws and annoyances. I've tried to catalogue them all, chronologically, which was the easiest way.

I swear this is the last of my long posts.

The Short Version

• Most of the colours are shades of white, grey, black, brown, yellowy-brown, or beige
• Everybody wears suits, in the above colours
• The suit dress-code makes identifying and differentiating between certain characters difficult
  
• There are too many background characters given too much screen time and personality
• There are too many foreign locales given too much screen time
  
• There is too much product placement
• The dialogue is divided into:

- Exposition, which is confusing (60%)
- Witty banter, which is boring (20%)
- People talking about Bond's emotional strife, which is unconvincing (20%)

• Despite all the talk of emotions, nobody ever expresses any
  
• At times, the film assumes the audience remembers every detail of the previous film, while at other times it treats them like idiots
• There are vast tracts of action that don't need to be there
  
• The director then tries to hide as much of this action as possible, either by having shots that are too fast for the human eye to pick up, bad camera angles, shaky camera-work, or constantly cutting away to something else
• There are too many setpieces that feel exactly like what they are
  

The Very Short Version

"Rurr rurr rurr rurr. I'm Marc Forster. I'm a fucking dick."

The Very Long Version
(Note: It's probably not worth reading this unless you're watching Quantum of Solace and really bored)

00:59 - An admittedly exciting (loud) opening, but one which sets the tone for the rest of the film (i.e. it's a chase, and it looks like a car advert). First chase scene [car/car]

2:18 - Bond seamlessly drives from a mountain road to a quarry. Possible, but not overly likely. Setpiece. Reminiscent of the construction site scene from Casino Royale

3:10 - The third time in as many minutes that Bond has been heading towards a vehicle coming the other way down the road. He dodges out of the way again

4:00 - Intro song starts. It's debatable as to whether the vocals are weak and emotionless, but most of the lyrics sound like a shopping list ('A phone on a table'). Compare to Casino Royale's You Know My Name, which concisely forebodes the coming story

7:10 - Intro song ends. 3 minutes of graphics consisting mostly of Bond walking through a desert and occasionally firing poorly-rendered bullets at sand-dunes. Compare to Casino Royale's intro graphics, which consist of Bond shooting, knife-fighting, and punching a few dozen henchmen to death. Intro graphics appears to be set inside a spinning globe, which must have been scientifically designed to induce motion sickness

7:26 - "Hello Mitchell." Bond's address to what appears to be a faceless non-character raises a red flag. Admittedly I expected him to die soon

10:10 - Second chase scene [man/man] starts, 6 minutes after the last ended

10:34 - MI6 base of operations is apparently a medieval dungeon

10:42 - Chase scene inter-cut with scenes of non-related horse race, as if to reinforce the fact that this is a chase. This isn't necessary

11:40 - An anomalously-long shot of an old woman mourning the fact that the bad guy has just squashed her hanging crate of fruit and vegetables. What a nasty man he is

11:53 - Conveniently on a rooftop. Director seems determined to keep cutting back to the horse race

12:45 - Second chase scene ends. Excessive use of shakey cam, extremely brief shots, and the physical similarity between Bond and the man he's chasing has made the whole thing difficult to follow

16:25 - This different MI6 base of operations contrasts with the first in that it's set somewhere in the future. Magic table, the graphics of which were probably intended to complement the confusing and extensive exposition but instead distract from it. Somebody is in room 325... somewhere

18:00 - Bond in hotel room. Having seen the Bourne films, it's clear that a man is going to come bursting out of the glass panel to the right

18:14 - Confusing shaky-cam knife-fight

20:02 - A minor chase scene (barely counts)

21:31 - A very nice Sony Vaio hand-held device from the future

25:10 - A very nice Sony Erikson mobile phone, with future capabilities

28:00 - Third(?) chase scene [bike>boat/boat] starts

31:00 - Bond somehow uses an anchor to capsize an enemy's boat. The physics of this aren't made abundantly clear. If the anchor is attached to his own boat and to the enemy boat, it makes sense that both boats would be buggered

31:21 - Moody shot of Daniel Craig in a boat

31:26 - Slow-tilt over beautiful, exotic landscape, with appropriate exotic-landscape-music (violins)

31:58 - A very nice Sony Erikson mobile phone, with future capabilities

32:15 - Director continues to insist on showing the audience shot after shot of local/foreign people (i.e. slightly grotty people doing slightly unusual things). The constant one-word foreign exclamations in the background ('Osa!') are becoming annoying

32:25 - Magic MI6 wall of wonder. Why, in an Secret Intelligence Service, an organization that surely values Secret Intelligence over all else, would you display vital information on glass walls?

33:03 - Sony Erikson phone

33:08 - "I'm afraid there's a firewall around his other corporate holdings" Oh noes! If only we were some sort of Secret Intelligence Service specializing in acquiring hidden information.

33:25 - Introduction of Gregg Beam. He doesn't look suspicious at all.

Nope

34:14 - Is having the people back at MI6 standing around like turnips talking to a magic wall intended to illustrate the divide between the bureaucratic office-types and the practical Bond-types that actually get the work done? Because it just makes MI6 look like a bunch of fags

36:04 - Wow, a Sony Erikson flip phone. Pretty snazzy

37:14 - Sony Erikson etc

37:30 - I DON'T CARE ABOUT THE BACKGROUND ACTORS. THE BACKGROUND ACTORS ARE IN THE BACKGROUND FOR A GOOD REASON. BECAUSE I DON'T CARE ABOUT THEM. GTFO OF FOREGROUND

38:00 - This plinky-plonky, slow-violin music is really starting to get on my nerves

38:24 - Man, I thought that was naked torso'd Daniel Craig looking through those wardrobes. Was it bollocks. IT WAS A FRICKETY FRIG BACKGROUND ACTOR. GTFO

(I've lost impartiality and will take a break)

41:36 - Sony Erikson mobile phone saves the world from international terrorism with it's ultra high-definition camera and face recognition software

43:50 - Yet again the director feels it a good idea to constantly intercut action with shots of something he finds more important, in this case the opera Tosca, which nobody cares about. Nobody

45:58 - Tilt over beautiful, exotic landscape, with appropriate exotic-landscape-music (violins)

46:00 - Moody shot of Daniel Craig in a boat

46:06 - Pan over beautiful, exotic landscape, with appropriate exotic-landscape-music (violins)

46:10 - Moody shot of Daniel Craig in boat

46:14 - Tilt-and-pan over beautiful exotic landscape, with appropriate exotic-landscape-music (violins)

46:55 - "And since you were innocent, they bought you this villa." Not just exposition, needless expostion

48:00 - While watching this part, it became evident that the entire film is rendered in sun-bleached, washed-out, pastel colours and that I was developing snow blindness

49:00 - My second favourite section of dialogue in the entire film

*Bond and Mathis at a bar on a plane*
Bartender: May I fix you a drink, sir?
Mathis: (To Bond) What are you drinking?
Bond: I dunno. (To bartender) What am I drinking?
Bartender (In one of the twattiest voices, ham-handedly delivers the following): Three measures of Gordon's gin, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet, which is not vermouth! Shaken well until it is ice cold and served with a large, thin slice of lemon peel.
*the camera then cuts to the bartender, who has a punchable face and a big Vigin Airlines badge on his shirt*

50:35 - A woman who can't even act being an emotionless prude

51:10 - Lets all look at the silly foreign people. Everywhere is so crammed with so many background actors it's no wonder they're spilling over into the foreground

52:36 - There are only two types of building in this film - modern, sparsely decorated ones painted in white, black and beige, and grotty foreign ones chiseled out of beige sandstone. Just had the latter, so now we have the former. At least the woman has red hair, which brings a bit of colour

53:24 - Despite spending the last 52 minutes, 24 seconds moping and whining and carrying on over how much he mourns the loss of Vesper, Bond suddenly decides to have sex with prudish red-hair woman. Despite being only characterised as a emotionless prude, prudish woman decides to have sex with Bond

53:30 - The naked Daniel Craig torso shot that 38:24 wasn't

54:12 - Background actors. "Señor!" That one's even Spanish

54:38 - A building combining haughty, sparsely-decorated, beige modernness and grotty, foreign dilapidatism

58:17 - Henchman takes Home Alone-esque tumble down stairs. And he's wearing a toupee! Ha ha! This film is actually a lighthearted comedy

59:52 - Did James Bond just use Mathis, the only character I've found the least bit likable, as a meat shield?

1:01:30 - And then dumped him in a bin?

1:02:11 - Long pan of desert landscape, with appropriate desert-landscape-music (panpipes). Heave a weary, weary sigh

1:02:33 - "I would like to buy a vintage plane from you, as it's the only way of traversing desert terrain."

1:02:56 - It's been half an hour without a chase and the audience is starting to drift off. Quickly, get the music playing

1:05:00 - Fourth and final chase scene, and probably the director's favourite, as it also incorporates long shots of beige desert landscape and unnecessary foreign chatter

1:08:06 - Bond is a strong guy, yes, but I'm quite sure the amount of force just sent through his arms would have caused a dislocation or two. Unfortunately, the blurry, shaky, misplaced camera makes it difficult to accurately tell how Bond distributed the force of the sudden deceleration

1:08:09 - Glorious reds

1:08:23 - And blues

1:08:26 - And greens

1:08:27 - "What's today's excuse, that Bond is legally blind?" It's not even that the dialogue's attempts at wit fall flat, it's like they're not even trying. The whole film is like this

1:10:00 - Looks like a set out of Stargate Atlantis

1:13:20 - "Nada! Nada! Nada!" Just in case the audience is unclear that there is no water from the repeated image of a dripping tap

1:14:10 - A badly-acted toff couple look in disgust at Bond and Woman's disheveled appearance. What is this director's obsession with everybody except the main characters?

1:15:00 - Let's all talk about our emotions

1:16:19 - Blows to the legs and torso don't cause unconsciousness so efficiently

1:17:50 - Background actors, stealing a television. They live such rich and full lives

1:18:19 - Grottiest grott-hole yet. Is that prostitute on the steps texting? Why is she doing that? Does it have any relevance to the story?

1:18:39 - Foreign people, grotty foreign hovel, background actors washing dishes, playing cards and smoking cigars

1:20:02 - Automatic weapons are entirely non-threatening. With a pistol there's the possibility Bond might take a non-fatal wound; semi-automatics just make sparks and broken glass all over the place

1:21:00 - Thankfully, the final, overly-modern hotel of the film. Which gets blown-up, which is something

1:21:03 - My favourite section of dialogue:

*Generals on balcony of future hotel. A humming noise starts up.*
*General#1 looks around in curiousity*
General#2: It's just the fuel cells. The whole compound runs on them.
General#1: Sounds highly unstable. . .
*A few seconds of pause to let that sink in*

Not just unstable, highly unstable. Because South American dictator are experts on this kind of thing. My radiator hums; I don't tip-toe around it in fear that it's going to explode.

1:26:24 - There go those highly unstable fuel cells

1:29:30 - Woman goes from being strong female character who just avenged her family to a crying ball in matter of seconds. Bond to the rescue, with hugs

1:30:48 - Bond shoots gas-tank from inside a room to blow out a wall. Surely the wall would focus most of the explosion back into the room, instantly killing Bond and Woman

1:34:26 - Nice to see Bond actually express an emotion

1:37:30 - The end of an very, very long 97 minutes.

FIRE EVERYTHING

I've ranted a lot recently. Fortunately, the Star Trek trailer speaks for itself.

It looks like they've got the general concept down, i.e. space is disease and danger, wrapped in darkness and silence but also extremely pretty, especially when you fill it up with multicolored phasers. But I'm particularly susceptible to the charm of bright colours after watching Quantum of Solace yesterday, which is such a fffffffflipping beige-fest.

Self-Indulgent Zelda/Bio Combo Post

Searching around recently for an award-winning premise to a sensual-love-novel, I was guided towards the Gerudo, a band of all-female thieves from the game Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Legend states that they give birth to a male Gerudo only once every hundred years and it's strongly implied that they spend the rest of the time propagating themselves through breeding with Hylian men. While this does make for a fine premise, it doesn't make a lot of sense biologically.

For comparison:
A Hylian

A Gerudo

As you can see, Gerudo are distinguished from the Hylian race by the traits of red hair, rounded ears, large noses, and tanned skin. Which raises the question, if they're only able to reproduce with Hylians how has the Gerudo gene pool not been watered down to extinction by Hylian genes within a handful of generations?

On top of that, why are male Gerudo so rare? And how did this state of affairs come to be in the first place?

Not one to pen an erotic novel unless it's built on a foundation of hardcore science, I tried to create a couple of explanatory theories.

Theory one - the Gerudo females only mate with the Gerudo male
It's never explicitly stated that they mate with Hylians, only that they take them as boyfriends. Assuming they only bear offspring to the Gerudo male, the gene pool would be preserved, though the implications of such extensive and repeated inbreeding (they'd all be half-siblings) would likely be severe.

This theory also relies on the Gerudo being extremely long-lived, an idea that's not entirely unfounded. Ganondorf has been present in Zelda games often set hundreds of years apart, and Koume and Kotake are quoted as being 400 and 380 years-old respectively upon their deaths; the counter-argument to this being that all three of them channel some serious voodoo magic that may have life-extending properties.

However, even if we assume that the Gerudo are immortal, this is an extremely risky means of reproducing. If that one male Gerudo dies, through accident or injury, during the hundred year gap between male births - which is extremely probable considering the Gerudo's warlike nature and harsh, desert environment - then there'll be nobody around to conceive the next male, and obviously the result would be extinction.

This theory also fails to address the rarity of the male.

Theory two - the maternal chromosomes are static
This allows the Gerudo to reproduce with Hylians under the requirement that all the genes necessary to create Gerudo characteristics are present on the maternal chromosomes, which are passed on from the mother to the daughter unchanged and in their entirety. No crossing over occurs during meiosis and the chromosomes are non-randomly segregated, effectively making each generation a series of half-clones.

While feasibly able to continue indefinitely without loss of genetic material, the health repercussions would be considerable. A survivable level of genetic diversity would be maintained by the constantly changing paternal chromosomes, but the maternal ones would gradually accumulate deleterious mutations that they'd be unable to shake through the reshuffling that normally occurs during meiosis.

Again, the end result would likely be extinction.

Theory three - sex-linked Gerudo-ness
My personal favourite theory is that the genes that code for Gerudo traits are located entirely on a single sex-chromosome, unique from both the X and Y. This hypothetical chromosome, tentatively named the Z chromosome, would resemble the Y in being devoid of all vital genes, coding only for the traits of red hair, large noses, rounded ears, tanned skin, and perhaps a propensity towards violence and kleptomania, all of which would be controlled by a hormone also encoded on the Z chromosome, tentatively named gerudosterone.

This would sortof make them more of a sub-species or third sex rather than a race.

Because very little crossing-over occurs between sex-chromosomes, the Gerudo genotype is secure no matter how extensively they outbreed with Hylians, and the Gerudo phenotype is fine so long as the Gerudo alleles for hair colour, nose size, rounded ears, and skin colouration are dominant over all of their Hylian counterparts.

Under this theory, the reason that Gerudo males are so rare is because they're completely non-viable. A male Gerudo zygote with karyotype 46,YZ would lack the genes on the X chromosome necessary for cell survival. The only way that a male could be viable is if he had aneuploidy, an extra chromosome. Through a fluke of meiosis, one of the gametes could be sporting both sex-chromosomes, resulting in a zygote with a karyotype 47,XYZ. The rarity of the male Gerudo is simply a result of the statistic unlikelihood of this disorder occurring.

The combined effects of testosterone and gerudosterone on the individual would potentially result in violent tendencies and a predisposition towards pure evil-

- though the psychological effects of being an infertile and hypogonadotrophic lone male in a fortress of women should not be overlooked as a cause of mental instability.

Origin
Considering the origin of sexual reproduction is still something of a mystery, it would be difficult for me to theorize what would cause a third sex to evolve into existence, so for the time being I'm going to cop-out and say that magic did it.

The origin story of Hyrule goes that it was created by three Goddesses - Din, Nayru, and Farore. Of the trio, Din most strongly resembles the Gerudo - being associated with themes of power, earth and fire (they live in a desert), and the colour red.

So I'm going to go ahead and say that the Gerudo are a genetic abnormality created by Din in the image of Din, based on that little evidence.

And also the fact that GERUDOS is an anagram of U R GODES.

Which even I'll accept is a stretch.

GODES doesn't even sound like Goddess.

And text speak barely existed in 1998.

Negative Nancy

Too long, do not read

The Scout Update has been out for over a week now and I haven't yet commented on it because:
a) I've been playing it
and
b) I don't think it's very good, and the fact that Valve are releasing these updates free-of-charge sort of makes me feel as though I don't have the right to complain, especially as TF2 has one of the finest hours-of-enjoyment:money-paid ratios of all the games I've ever played.

But what the hey.

The problem with the Scout update is that new weapons aren't very fun for any and all concerned.

The Force-O-Nature: it's third jump is negligible, and the knockback it delivers to the enemy is not only irritatingly disorientating for them but means that the Scout has to chase after his target and recalibrate his aim with each shot due to them being launched out of the point-blank range in which the weapon is remotely effective. Being hit by the knockback generally propels you into the air, making maneuvering to safety (or at all) difficult, an ability that can now be claimed by the Scout, the Soldier, the Demoman, the Pyro, and partly the Heavy.

The Sandman: A purely terrible weapon in all ways. The idea of rendering the player incapable of even reacting whilst the enemy team lays into them should not have even been considered. It's maddening. Whilst the removal of the Scout's double jump is admittedly a steep and restrictive trade-off, balancing out an annoying effect with another annoying effect does not make good design.
Plus, having to wait 10 seconds for your baseball to replenish screws with the idea of the Scout being a fast, twitchy class.

Bonk! energy drink: Useless. Presumably the idea behind it was that the Scout could use the invulnerability to get through particularly bad choke points. Unfortunately, the 1 second it takes to drink the thing necessitates that you use it out of combat, and the 6 second invincibility only lasts long enough to get you into enemy lines, rarely out the other side. Bizarrely, despite dodging the projectiles thrown at him, the scout still takes knockback, so that any choke-point sporting an enemy sentry gun (i.e. all of them) is extremely difficult to navigate.
If you somehow succeed in passing through the choke-point, you're reduced to the speed of a Soldier, ensuring that all but the slowest classes who care to follow your giant blur-trail can hunt you down with ease.
Why is the Scout even slowed down after use? Surely the lack of a pistol is trade-off enough.

Then there's the inability to cap a point or carry the intelligence while under the effect of Bonk! So you can get into a base, but not out of it.

And then there's the fact that Valve forgot to remove the word final from the end of the new maps. It's a minor detail that suggests that Valve aren't really giving the updates their full attention and, while I'm in no position to hold them to any standards but their own, they run the risk of mucking up a fine game with sloppy updating.

Whine complete.

The effect I have on most women

There's a woman in the Carnegie Building reception who recognizes me on sight and seemingly hates my guts, simply for the reason that I always ask stupid questions.

I don't understand why; it's not as though my queries take a lot of effort to resolve - usually just a 'no' and then a slightly more forceful 'no, go home' suffices.

I've made a colossal mistake

It seems that there are two Sarah Colosso's in the University. One is an anatomist, whilst the other took up the last name Colosso as a stage name (?).

The practical up-shot of this revelation is negligible as I know neither of them, though it does mean that the woman I've been picturing in a Pikachu costume since last October is not the woman who was wearing the Pikachu costume last October.

I've said too much.

I'm gonna lay you out to rest

Some people have no library etiquette at all. There's a man sat next to me suceeding in making as much noise as possible without outright speaking or playing an instrument.

Sofar, he's:

• sniffed a lot
• cleared his throat four times
• tapped his feet
• tapped his fingers
• tapped his pen
• dropped each of his ten books onto a pile, one at a time
  
• eaten an apple
• drunk quite loudly
• sighed lengthily
• whistled

The only excuse for whistling in a library is if the person sitting next to you has just knocked out your front teeth or forced a pen through your trachea. What an annoying man.

Secret Blogging Fetish

I'm long overdue for posting links to Heather Minto's Mint Blog and Steven Garrard Garrulous Blog, which are both extremely good and proffessional.

Heather has amazing skills with an extremely long camera and Steven has impeccable taste in all entertainment mediums and is a very funny man.

You should read them.

I don't know why I'm doing this, as they make up a large fraction of my readership anyway.

Ichi Ni San Shi GO GO GO GO

1. Play World of Warcraft - check
2. Join Roleplaying Society - check
3. Attend Anime Convention - check
4. Ritual suicide - pending

Thanks a great deal to Steven and Alex for also attending D-Con 2009 (Scotland's Only Anime/Art Convention); it made things marginally more socially acceptable. I returned about an hour after you guys left to witness and record the Street Fighter tournament and Cosplay Competition. Most of the photographs were rendered worthless by the darkness of mono and floor five, but I got one of the two Squalls:


And another of the chobit, the girl with the green hair, and the girl with the white hair and companion cube together, but apparently my camera was far too excited to focus.

They exist only in my memories now.

There's also a poor quality video of the bewildering end of proceedings. The Chobit (the one in the white dress with the stockings and cat ears) was the winner.



And so my cosplay adventure ends, and I leave only slightly less confused than when I arrived.

A Life Of Bitter Irony

It looks like I'm the last person remaining in Painfully Single Team. Is that ironic?

I don't know if it's ironic, but it certainly not fun times.

Well, zis was a disappointment!

Another Gross Anatomy exam, another disaster. I must have written down 'median nerve' about a dozen times.

Q1. What is this structure?
A. The median nerve

Q2. What innervates the structure seen in Q1?
A. Erm. The median nerve

At least I seem to care less with each passing failure. And I may not be a good Biologist, but at least I can... whistle pretty okay. Assuming I don't damage the median nerve of the face, I'll always be able to whistle pretty okay.

What if everything you ever wanted CAME IN A ROCKET CAN!?!

You'll be UNCOMFORTABLY ENERGETIC!

The second Scout update has been released and is seemingly an energy drink that replaces the Scout's pistol, allowing him to run as fast as a Kenyan and dodge bullets.

This sounds like it could screw over the Engineer and Heavy quite some, what with their reliance almost entirely on hitscan weapons. But when God gives you lemons you FIND A NEW GOD.

The Cost of Freedom - £30

'''And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of the setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;

A motion and a spirit, that impels.'
- Wordsworth'

-The back of a relentless can'

- Egotrain, 2008'

- Egotrain, 2009

Never have finer words been spoken, quoted, used in advertising, then blogged and reblogged. Today has been a good day. The sun shone in a manner befitting of summer. I went for a jog, a swim, sat in the sauna for a good half an hour, and finally bought a second-hand bike off three bald men in overalls.

From then until teatime I rode around Dundee Town, singing afternoon delight, wearing an expression of glee that one really should expect to see more often on the face of somebody who doesn't work for a living. Only as I write this is the blood beginning to flow back into my perineum.

It doesn't really have a turning circle to speak of and the brakes are hit and miss, but I'm thinking of painting it midnight black with speed lines and christening it the StarRocket.

Fair is foul, and foul is fair: Thunder through the clear and empty air

While queueing up for my weekly handout of lentil soup from the Church kitchens, there came a roll of thunder from a cloudless sky. I considered that God might be trying to tell me something, but if he's got something to say to me he can do it to my face.

I was fourth in line. Places 1-3 were taken by a trio of portly women, who were making really quite vicious passive-aggressive remarks about each other's physical stature and appearance, and occasionally poking each other in the stomach. It was really awkward to be in the vicinity of.

Mr Sandman, I'm so alone

I was intending to spend Valentine's Day drinking and blogging about an imaginary girlfriend, but fortunately I was called away on catsitting duty before being able to follow through on what would surely have been a disasterous plan. Instead, I had the joy of looking after Jam for the weekend and reading my way through most of Steven's Sandman series of graphic novels. Which were good.

In a non-interesting coincidence, the first of the Scout's weapon updates to be released is called The Sandman - Link. It looks alright, but I'm a bit worried at the number of movement impairing weapons that Valve are releasing. They've already had the Airblast and Natasha. At this rate, the demoman will be firing literal sticky bombs that glue people to walls, the Sniper will be harpooning people to surfaces, the Spy will have a sapper that only targets people's shoes, and so on.

Nobody is going to be able to move an inch.

Hopefully the coming two other unlocks will have something a bit more interesting.

Other than that, I really have nothing else to blog about. My free time has been taken up by TF2 quite a bit, so I removed it, but I still need time to catch up on world events. I can't even blog about how much a knob I am for going to the gym because my body has conspired to keep me away from physical exertion. My torso now clicks every time my thorax is twisted relative to my abdomen, so I've chosen to lay off gyming. Also, every time I eat something or think about eating something I feel nauseous, so I don't eat, so I don't have any energy.

If you've ever felt the desire to push me over and not have me get back up, now is the time.

Scotland's Only Anime/Art Convention 2

Dear Past Self,

The correct date is the 28th of February. Quit trying to sabotage Future Self's life, fuckface.

I'll get you.

From "Future" Self

Scotland's Only Anime/Art Convention

Dear Future Self,

Try to remember to go to the Anime Convention on the 29th of February. It's the only one Scotland has.

Don't forget, y'eejit.

Serious.

There's no day like snow day

It's snowing so hard right now. I like snow but I'm always stressed about when it's going to stop snowing. Because it has to, sooner or later. And the knowledge that one should be out there enjoying the snow rather than sitting in lectures watching the snow is maddening. And then there's the fear that one is not enjoying the precious time we have with snow to it's utmost potential.

Snow is like a metaphor for life and death. Except I don't enjoy life as much as I enjoy snow.

He's Just Not That into You

Why does the poster for the film 'He's Just Not That into You' put such an emphasis on the 'not'? I don't understand how putting 'not' in italics changes the meaning of the sentence in any way. I'm not saying it's grammatically incorrect, butI've run it through my head so many times that it's lost all meaning.

If the emphasis was on the 'He' or the 'You' I could understand it, and frankly they would both make more compelling titles.

'He's just not that into you." (OMG, but who is into me?!)

'He's just not that into you.' (OMG, he's cheating on me?!)

He's just not that into you. He just is not that into you. He just isn't that into you.
...

Give us this day our Soup

Say what you will about the Church, they do make heavenly soup.

Ho ho.

Incidentally, I was wearing my large green old coat in order to appear more tramp-like while stealing soup from the Church. It has the bonus of being extremely warm, though it does make me look like a farmer-rapist.

I assumed this was why a policeman looked at me shifty in the street, but I later found out it could have been because I had what I believe to be human fat caked to the front of my face.

Well obviously I didn't know it was there.

I got a hangnail right under my cuticle

I've actually got a ulcer right above my mandible. It does hurt like a bitch that I did last night though. And it means that anything more solid than soup causes intense pain.

I can't even eat midget gems. How does a midget gem agrivate an ulcer?

Hope this news has brought a little light into your life.

Gy'orgy Arouss >> Assassin

My first RP character, a dancing gypsy knife-fighter, died on monday, torn in twain by an six armed demon woman.

In his place shall rise a rather stereotypical Assassin, who will be slightly more prepared for battle and have skills other than dancing.

Not that I didn't get an abnormal amount of use out of the skill Dancing.

Currently looking for Assassin names.

Jurassic Farce

Considering the amount of time I waste, it's a little odd that I should get annoyed at Jurassic Park wasting ten seconds of my life. When the DVD menu first loads, I'm forced to watch a brief clip of a raptor bounding across the floor of the Jurassic Park Visitor Center before the options even appear. And then when I choose an option, I get treated to another five-second, slightly-unpleasant clip of the raptor sliding back into frame and then leaping and screaming into my face, before the DVD accepts that I pressed 'Play Film' and actually Plays the Film.

All I want to do is Play the damn Film.

Maybe it's because those ten seconds are keeping me away from dinosaur fun, or because it's visually or auditory unpleasant, or because short DVD menu-animations are so ubiquitous these days.

Or maybe it's because Steven Spielberg has wasted enough of my time already.

Fucking Indiana Jones.

If a man steals to ensure that he's not done at work, is it truly stealing?

Microsoft Songsmith - it's the cool new thing.

It amazes me the number of times that adverts promote casual stealing. It seems that all marketing executives are under the impression that everybody else is willing to steal to attain a product, just because it's ludicrously tasty or whatever.

Maybe this is because everybody in marketing is evil.

Edit: Note that songsmith can hardly be attributed to the family now "having a happy home with every word in rhyme" because A) it doesn't come with a rhyming dictionary and B) the husband was singing normal speech even before coming into contact with the software.

The Emerald Crusade

Weapons/tools wielded by the zealous tree-planting wing of Greenpeace:

• A spring or gas powered gun that fires seeds into the soil. They would have to be coated in a protective substance that then dissolves, idealy providing nutrition in doing so. Name: Seedvolver (Or Peastol if used to plant peas)
  

• A crossbow that fires bamboo sticks into the ground. Name: Bambow.

• A shotgun that fires a cloud of fungal spores. Name: Mushboom stick.
  

This is a sign that I've been listening to too many TF2 weapon ideas.

Gaypeace

It's nice to see that Alistair McGowan is finally giving back to society, after that unpleasant identity-theft business. Rehabilitation works.

Similar to David Cameron though, you never seem to see Greenpeace doing anything particularly productive. Mostly they seem just to complain a lot and loudly, and stand or lie in the way of people or bulldozers.

I would be much more inclined to like them if they just pursued a super-aggressive campaign of tree-planting, attempting to force plants to grow in the most unlikely places.

Why can't a horde of Greenpeace activists descend upon Barnsley with shovels and soil, leaving eratically placed greenery in their wake?

They need an arm devoted entirely to reforestation and aforestation to publicly show off their nurturing side.

But then saving the planet isn't really a popularity contest.

Spider II

So now there's a spider in this room somewhere. Anywhere. What I hate about spiders, after the legs, and the hairfuzz, and the speed at which they move, is their ability to climb. The floor isn't safe. The walls aren't safe. The roof isn't safe.

Why, a spider could be clinging to the underside of this computer table right now.

Coating the skirting board in honey is the only way to limit them to a single plane.

Spider

My poor heart is going a kilometre a minute. There was some fat spider on the wall behind the monitor, just high enough to make it impossible to watch both the screen and it's rotten arse at the same time. Was happily going about my internet business when it suddenly plumetted down into my field of view and down the back of the computer table.

Incompetent wall-hanging fuck.

Quit whining

I know nothing about politics but if I see one more headline beginning with the words 'Cameron criticizes-' or 'Cameron slams-' I'm never voting Conservative.

Actually, that's a bit much. If I see five such headlines between now and the next general election then I won't vote Conservative for fifteen years.

Hangover Watch

I don't feel sick but I feel that I could start feeling sick within the hour, and start being sick shortly thereafter.

My head is clear.

My vision is a little pained.

My throat feels somewhat constricted.

I am off my food.

I could probably make a good haiku out of these symptoms.

They may take our freedom

It often worries me that come the day when a totalitarian regime gains power in this country, I'm likely one of the people who'll sit back and let it. Wakey Town was absolutely swarming with Po Po and I quite liked it. It felt safe.

Admittedly, this is in direct contrast to Huddersfield, where a violent stabbing or fatal shooting happens every other weekend. But there's a certain willingness with which I bend over to Authority and think of England.