Getting Carried Away

Behold!

Me with a vegetable drainer on my head:




The Big Daddy monster out of Bioshock:

"Nothing ever happens here, just bowling."

Nothing better for bringing one's journal internetif out of nigh-on-retirement than a story about a man trapped in a toilet for four days. While I certainly don't envy the poor chap, I think he's milking it a little when he attributes his eventual escape to the fact that he once went on a survival course. Presumably when he took the course he was anticipating putting his skills to use finding edible insects or sewing up his own wounds in, I don't know, the Sahara or a plane crash or a nuclear fallout or something, rather than warming his feet in the gents' WC of the Kittybrewster and Woodside Bowling Club, Aberdeen. Still, good job he didn't go for the Intermediate Spanish instead.

Also on the 'I promise I've been working all day and not just browsing various newspaper and/or videogames-based websites' front, I noticed something earlier which testifies to the power of the 'Most Read/Emailed' list. You know the ones - if you go to the Guardian or BBC News websites, for instance, they've got a little column on the front page showing what four or five stories are currently getting the most hits. As The Onion has noted before, this fascinating glimpse into what Joe and Joleen Public actually give a toss about rarely coincides with the 'important' stories, focusing instead on things like the discovery of the New Guinean Rabbit-Faced Girl or (this one's true) the driving instructor who was jailed for putting a carrot in his trousers and pretending that one of his pupil's parking maneouvres was so good it had given him an erection. Which, let's face it, we all read.

And of course it's a vicious circle, because once something's on that list it gets seen by everyone who visits the homepage, and we'd much rather read that than an extensive piece on interest rates or genocide or Madeleine McCann or whatever. Such stories are subject not to time but only mirth, and this might explain how a story about a man who chopped his own penis off in a restaurant on the Strand has managed to top the BBC Most Read list EIGHT MONTHS after it was originally posted.

I only know this because I read it first time round.

(UPDATE: Even as I write this, the penis-chopping story has dropped off (bad choice of words) and the man trapped in the toilet has appeared up there instead. I'm like Reuters! Only better.)

I didn't do English.

I learnt a few things during a game of Scrabble today.

1) Just because you can fart in someone's ear doesn't mean you can enfart them.

2) Even if there is an obscure Marvel superhero called Sheero, you still can't use that word because it's a proper noun.

3) Scrabble is a stupid, unfair game.

I've also trapped a nerve in my neck, which is bloody annoying not just because it HURTS LIKE FUCK but because the best way to soothe it is to wear a big scarf, only I don't own a scarf so I've had to borrow one of m'lady's, which is actually quite a nice scarlet one which I could easily pass off in public, were it not for the fact that I have glasses and dark scruffy hair and am currently reading a Harry Potter book, so I just end up looking like an obsessive freak. Which I only am if you count the OCD.

One for the folkies now. I went to see Stewart Lee last week - just in performance you understand, we're not on friendly house-visiting terms or anything - and his support act, rather than a fellow stand-up comedian, was an obscure musical contemporary of the Fairport Convention et al. Yet when Merriman Weir took the stage, even his actually rather impressive pickin'-fingers couldn't shake the feeling that I'd seen him somewhere before. (No, not there for once.)

From Outer Space

Long time no write. Whither such absence? Divers alarums:

1) A Great Big Holiday in New York City, New York, United States of America, The World. I didn't take many pictures. (Quickly consults phone camera to make sure.) Actually I took rather a lot of pictures, but they're mainly of humourous medieval stained glass windows in the city's reconstituted monastery known as The Cloisters (you want a link? Google it yourself, you sloven). There's a great one of some monkeys doing carpentry. And an even better one of a man trying to herd sheep by sneaking up on them behind a big cardboard cut-out of a cow. Maybe that's what the monkeys were making!

No, I'm not putting the pictures up yet. Go to New York and take some pictures yourself, you sloven.

2) Work is busy. Busier than ever. Like, twelve-hour-days-are-fairly-standard busy. This kind of slavery is acceptable to dedicated and/or gullible types like bankers or lawyers, but it's a bit much for a poor little multimedia grunt, even if many of the said hours are spent playing and/or watching footage of terribly exciting videogames. I've even had to miss the pub quiz. Horrors. Well, at least that provides me with a Dark Secret, a Dreadful Sin I shall Forever Regret, which will come in handy for episode five once Earth is invaded by aliens and I'm one of only a rag-tag band of humans left struggling for survival despite all being very different characters, and everyone in the rag-tag band of surviving humans struggling for survival against the odds will wonder why I'm so pensive and quiet until episode five when it turns out I'm still haunted by my failure to go to the pub quiz just because work was a bit busy, and also because the aliens shot off my tongue.

3) That's it for now.

It's what all the cool kids have

My DS ran out of batteries on the train this morning. Nooooooo! Now how am I supposed to level up Picharisu?

On a lighter note, we went to St. John last night. Not the saint - he was busy - but the restaurant near Smithfield. I'd love to say it was a revelation, but though HILARIOUS this would be inaccurate, since I'd already been told by numerous people (include some of my loyal readers) that it was bloody brilliant. And they were right. I'd never had roast bone marrow before, but now I vow to have it in my sandwiches every day.

Forgive me the following image. I had a pun; I had Photoshop; I had a spare ten minutes.

A Deep Regression

I may have exaggerated in my last post (so, so long ago it feels now), and in fact I did manage to do some work on Shingles on my week off. Just a little bit, though. Enough to make it depressing that I then got addicted to Pokémon.

Pokémon's great though. Yes, it's meant for ten-year-olds. Yes, it's exactly the same game for ten-year-olds that they've been releasing and re-releasing with various different covers since 1998. But there's a reason why, when some of its original fans have now graduated from university, it still sells in buckets; and a reason why grown-up gamers are getting into it too. In part it's because you can now play it on a trendy-looking black DS Lite rather than a slightly embarrassing purple glittery Gameboy. But more importantly it's because it contains the magic formula upon which all the best games are founded, be they a ten-second blast on Asteroids or a ten-year slog of postal chess: the rules are simple, the possibilities endless.

Of course, when you try to explain to someone that you're in a dilemma over whether your level 19 Grotle (recently evolved from a Turtwig) should forget the Razor Leaf move in order to learn the Curse move, bearing in mind that Curse is really only effective for Ghost-type Pokemon, whereas Razor Leaf, being a Grass-type move, will serve him very well in the upcoming Oreburgh Mines where the wild Pokémon are mostly Ground-type and there a very few Fire-type Pokémon around, who would be very strong against him even though he's holding the Quick Claw - when you try to explain that, people don't think the rules are simple. They just step away.

And it isn't childish either. Even though Budew is very sweet. The way I see it, there are two ways to view one's participation in the world of the 'Mon:


VIEW 1
I am a Pokémon trainer! I'm on a great adventure through the magical land of Sinnoh, seeing marvellous cities, towering mountains and rolling green plains. I meet all kinds of interesting people. I gotta catch 'em all! I use Pokéballs to catch wild Pokémon, then I train them and battle with other Pokémon owners that I meet!


VIEW 2
I am a poacher. I have no fixed abode. I wander from town to town, never eating, never sleeping. I spend my days trapping wild animals, then I cram 'em into tiny spherical units and carry 'em around in my pockets. I force 'em to fight till they're nearly dead - they get burnt, bitten, poisoned, paralyzed, but anything that don't kills 'em makes 'em stronger. I breeds 'em to create better specimens, then I sets 'em loose upon other people's pets to get money and sweet, sweet potions.

I also have sex with disease-ridden whores.




VIEW 1 (addendum)
I have sex with disease-ridden whores too!

A Week of Not Much

Every now and then I start prattling on about Monkey Island a-gain, and today's your lucky day. I just came across this Reduced Shakespeare Company-esque Flash movie of the whole first game condensed into about two minutes. It'll be enjoyed by at least one known reader who knows the game, while everyone else can appreciate the nifty Flash animation and (oh dear God forgive me for what I am about to say) 'zany' humour, lifted by-and-large straight from the game. It's a bit odd watching a parody of something which the parodiers obviously realise is very funny to start with, and even odder when the accents are all in German, but it works. It also reminds me that m'lady shares her name with Guybrush Threepwood's girl. Rock on! This is obviously a vital factor in our relationship.

I've been house-sitting this week, which has given me lots of time to spend thinking about how I should be spending it working on Shingles, instead of playing The Sims 2. I have, however, managed to force myself to do a decent amount of work today (two thirds of the way through my time here), and even managed to use my Wacom tablet for part of it, which I understand is very de rigeur for any aspiring digital artiste in these modern days. For those baffled by jargon, a Wacom tablet is one of those things which looks like a mousemat and which you draw on with a special pen/stylus thing, and what you draw comes out on the screen. It's basically an alternative to using a mouse, but it's a lot trickier to use than you'd think. It doesn't really feel like a pen or a mouse, and your brain's full of conflicting signals, especially if you're a lefty like me who uses a mouse in one hand and a pen in the other. In general, it seems to be that the pen's better for broad strokes and painting, while the mouse remains the quickest and most accurate option for, saying, clicking around icons. (Luckily, though being left-handed is in some ways a hindrance, it does mean that I can hold the pen and mouse at the same time, and use whichever's handiest for what I need to do at that moment. Makes me feel like an octopus, too.)

Mind you, Sims 2 is much cooler than I expected. The makers seem to have cottoned on to the fact that people had the most fun with the original game when ignoring the standard goals and just torturing their Sims instead - locking them in a room with no doors until they wet themselves, force-feeding them, coercing them into having sex with their mother, or - my personal favourite - building a swimming pool, letting them climb in, then taking the steps away and raising the sides. The sequel therefore pretty much encourages such voyeuristic sadism, and the house I've created has got incredibly... dark. I just typed out a paragraph of everything that's been going on in it, but then thought I should take it out again. Probably best it isn't recorded.

Nintendo have had to recall a whole run of the Mario Party 8 game for the Wii. Not because it's rubbish (although it is), but because someone negelected to localise one of the game's little rhymes which tell the player what to do in each section. You see, it contained a word which is a perfectly honest scientific term in the States, but has become a bit of a taboo over in Blighty. Behold:

Magikoopa Magic!
Make the train spastic!
Turn this ticket tragic!

To be honest, the scanning and grammar are also pretty offensive, but you can see where the outcries are coming from.

Funnily enough, there was a much worse incident recently with the very same s-word which passed almost without comment. Ubisoft's Mind Quiz was pulled from shelves for ranking particularly low-scoring players as 'spastic'. Which seems a bit harsh. The rank that is, not pulling it.