Metalmickey

Sorry to get back on topic... ...but I hadn't really watched any Firefly until last weekend, when there was a bank holiday weekend special 'Joss-a-thon' on Sunday on one of the cable TV channels in the apartment I'm staying in that lasted more than an entire day. I started watching at about 2pm, and assume I must have missed a few episodes, and continued to watch untill midnight when it changed to peoples' favourite Angel episodes instead. I couldn't believe they stuck with 1 series and played consecutive episodes for that long, it's the longest non-stop TV session I've had for at least 10 years. In the advert breaks, they had mini-cast interviews, and about 3 different adverts for Serenity. I now officially consider myself a 'fan', though very much behind on all the chit chat

Bloody shitcakes, what has become of me?! The last memory I have of being truly myself was of seeing Savage Cabbage open the stairwell doors as I headed upwards to 13B. I waved at him as I walked past, then seconds later collapsed as my chest grew numb and everything grew dark. I assume I must have been out... far beyond mere unconsciousness... for days. Frankly, I'm surprised I came back at all. I have been forced to conclude that somehow this virus kept me alive. Well... not quite fully alive I should say, I am certainly... different now. I still have no sensation in my torso or the back of my head, my limbs feel like they're made of lead, and from these damn spasms I can only assume that I still have severe internal trauma that doesn't seem to be healing as time goes by. My blood has thickened and turned black, and I am no longer able to poo. I think I've missed most of the show unfortunately. During my 'downtime', someone had done poor Whitey in, and the 60 metres of access tunnels to the surface and the 10 floors of the facility immediately below them have been destroyed by some sort of thermo-nuclear device, effectively sealing the rest of the outbreak beneath a 100 metre cauterised crust of molten slag and scorched earth. I wonder how Savage Cabbage is doing, maybe he's the one that saved me from whatever it was that attacked me on the stairs? Down here in the cellars where I crawled, away from the buring light that so hurts my wretched eyes now, I wait... and listen. Between the haunted murmurs that waft around these depths, from the distant whispers in the air vents I have caught small soundbites and small pinches of reality that suggest Savage Cabbage and Lailloken have the situation under control now. Perhaps they will find me one day, when they come to finally clear this damn place out. Perhaps time will eventually see me paraded about in a cage, or carted from lab to lab as scientists perform experiments on me, trying to determine why my brain is still cogniscent while the rest of my useless body is clearly in a state of semi-animate necrosis. Still, even mentally, I am not half the man I was. My mental faculties have retarded to the point where writing this final memo has taken me ten and a half days! Only my vast experience as a tester has enabled me to keep things relatively clear and error free. Oh, dear god how I miss the games...

Aww, nothing wrong with Pong back in the day. That was the first arcade game ever. The history of it has reminded me of another very old game I used to play for many years on the first few IBMs and later 'PC-compatables': Space-War. Any of you play that? It was the first ever game, written at MIT during the 60's, and needing a computer the size of a room (hence no arcade version till many years later, after pong), but it fit on a 5.25" floppy and ran on most anything by 80s. It looks like 2 player deathmatch asteroids with looping screen boundaries and gravity that affected the torpedoes you could fire at each other. That was probably the first game where I spent a lot of time playing against other people. Lemme find a random link...

The first game I remember playing was probably a game called Artillery on the commodore pet. A blocky, green screen, tanks precurser where you typed in the angle of your turrent and number of bags of gun powder, then confirmed yes to shoot and watched as the shell slowly arced across the screen towards your human opponent's tank. I played it against my dad probably around the age of 3, which would have been in about 1981. My next couple of most memorable games would have been 'Tron deadly disks' on my dad's Atari Intellivision, and 'Pyjamarama' with Wally Weak on my dad's Amstrad CPC 664. I guess you could say I was raised playing games by my dad years before I knew any friends/peers who had their own gaming platforms.

To the remaining members of the medical team, I regret to inform you that we have been forced to detain Rusalka in the holding cells with the others until such time as we can determine the cause of infection. It seems to be spreading through the facility at an alarming rate, despite our best efforts at quarantine. She's making odd claims about having eaten Spaff, though we know full well that he's just a bit late coming back from his vacation. She claims the vial that was broken in test lab 2 was unmarked, and contained a viscous black liquid. We have been unable to determine the vial's reference number from the dispensary logs, but from the description it sounds like one of the specimens taken from the zombie dog we caught sniffing around the bike cage in the underground car park last week. A quick stock check yesterday still shows all vials present in Dispensary A though, so someone must have made a mistake somewhere. If this was an unlogged specimin vial, it should already have been treated, but it's got us worried. The consequences of an untreated specimin being exposed to the air outside of the quarantine chamber is too horrific to imagine. Still, there's no-one in this facility who would deliberately sabotage the health and safety of everyone here. I expect this was just someone's practical joke going off prematurely, and everything will be fine once this delirium wears off. Oh, that reminds me, just in case we do have any more jokers amongst us, I've upgraded the security access on dispensary A to a dual-key mechanism that requires the simultaneous use of the blue and green keycards on the panels either side of the door. The blue keycard I've left with quartermaster Johnson over in the security lab in Epsilon sector. We really should make a 2nd, emergency copy of some of these cards... I'll go and copy my green keycard right away up in the replication lab of level 13B. I'll take the stairs this time and get some excersize, then go see someone about this damn rash I've picked up from god knows where. So... itchy.

That's a great thread! Good find I always thought Moulin Rouge was a chick flick, but I don't really like musicals so I'm biased.

It's always nice when school science lessons turn out to be useful for something after all. Thanks

Indeed, birthdays for everyone!! ...umm, but especially Walter and Liv/Liz, neither of whom I am as familiar with as I'd like to be... or something

This is a fascinating topic, and I'm disappointed in myself for not remembering what conclusions I drew the last time I pondered the matter. I think that there are probably a number of distinct possibilities regarding zombie anal excretion: 1. Hungry though they may be, many zombies don't get to eat for extremely long periods of time, be they trapped in a tomb/mine/cell, wandering the wilderness or buried 'dead' in the earth. These zombies would never have anything to poo I should imagine. 2. Zombies with the aforementioned holes in their necks/bellies/intestines may eat all they like, but I guess the food would just plop out of their various holes now and then in various states of partial digestion. Probably none of it actually reaches the rectum, and I personally feel that this invalidates its status as 'proper' poo, despite the unpleasantness involved. 3. Those lucky zombies who are both relatively hole-free and also able to find the human flesh they so desire may well keep food inside them for the entire passage through their alimentary canal. Somehow though, I imagine they don't have the best bowel control, and given their general stink and uncleanliness, probably aren't fussed either. These ghastly creatures probably just shit slowly but constantly, leaving a trail of foul faeces in their wake wherever they wander, mingling with the pus, blood, rotted flesh, urine and scraps of clothing that tear/fall/leak as they stumble and crawl around the place. One of the key assumptions here is that the process of peristalsis still occurs in a zombie's guts, pushing the shit ever onwards, anus-bound. Perhaps in their semi-animate state however, the guts and villi within do not move, and the 'shiznit' merely builds up until an inevital rupture or prolapse occurs. More investigation is needed methinks.

Penetration is used too much to seem really rude to me, as exemplified by all the previous examples moist... Now there's a word

Christ What if Vlynn posts a photo of herself after you've said all that, and your next piece of advice is "Erm, best try and stick with him if I were you..." Hmm, how can I attempt to save this Wait a minute, I know... Vlynn911, I'm single, male, desperate, and likely to touch myself while looking at any photo of yourself that you may post here... Now there's a perfectly valid reason to avoid the whole photo posting situation and resume the discussion instead

Repetetive or no, this news has made me happy. I've loved all those old Gollop spawned progeny. Rebelstar back on my Amstrad CPC was amazingly deep for its time, the entire game played out across just 1 mission, 1 map. You could find coffee tokens and 'apply' them on vendor machines, and even all the non-interactive objects had unique properties as far as cover provided, armour, health, etc was concerned. All the named characters on the human side had significantly different skills and oh god damn I could go on forever The fully automatic grenade launcher rifle spewing out 3 round auto bursts and literally tearing the map apart was one of the best weapons ever, even if was extremely unwieldy and decidedly suicidal in all but the best circumstances. Damn, must stop before I start talking about Laser Squad and all the later ones...

Why does your design give me such a strong impression of rudeness? It's like it simultaneously represents at least 4 naked body parts at once, but I'm having trouble identifying them, as disturbing as something out of Naked Lunch, yet stationary and without the fleshy colours. Erm, anyway...

Tekken 5 is lovely It's got all the fun of Tekken 3, with some good new characters that aren't just re-skinned (eww) versions of old characters, and more eye candy effects. In short, it's better looking and has the high quality FMVs of Tekken 4, but thankfully still has the fun factor that Tekken 3 and tag have. Shame about the capcom games. I still like playing Marvel vs Capcom 2, but mainly just because I'm a big comics fan, and don't really know the King of fighters series much. I don't remember 3rd Strike being particularly hard on the Dreamcast, but I guess the arcade had a higher default difficulty setting. I kind of miss 3rd Strike as I only saw that around for a year or 2 and haven't seen it since in any shape or form.

Just saw the (US?) version in the shops here in Montréal, and the free original games are a nice obvious sticker on the front of the box. Anyone who knows me in the UK want me to bring a copy back?