Nachimir

No, it just has some very noticeable people

After the demo, I'm not feeling the love for Shadow Complex. Trial HD, however: YES. The little marker for the next closest friend actually acts like a pretty good guide as to where you're fucking up on the course. Also, showing high scores from your friends in the demo is probably a stroke of genius in terms of getting people to buy it.

Part of 4chan.

I like it even more now I know Gavin Bryars and Brian Eno had something to do with it

Argh :( Much as I like Justice, how did they think electro would work with that setting? Not much better than a song like that with choppily edited clips of a renaissance dude killing other renaissance dudes to kill my interest :/

Even one I wrote for a friend's birthday, which was blatantly full of nonsense and had no references, lasted 6 months or so before deletion. We were expecting it to be a matter of hours.

Pole Position on an Atari. I think I was about 4. After that, Bruce Lee on the Amstrad CPC 464. Annoying my brother by blowing the Green man's horn instead of helping him defeat the ninja was one of my favorite things at that age

Foucault's Pendulum is one of my favorite books, as it completely dismantles a major trend of the past 25 years or so. Chris, you are . I'd like to read that interview too. Dan Brown is totally a character from the book

You handled that way better than I would have Miffy Given that there were two of them and they were drunk, there's probably a good chance any authorities that got involved would have come down on your side. However, it could still have been months of hassle.

Spaff sent me this last night: zKH3iemEd-A Ouch! Glad they made the school/players anonymous.

Can't believe I forgot Shogi! It's basically Japanese Chess, but I find it much more enjoyable. It can be a lot more aggressive, but that doesn't make it a shorter game. You can expend turns placing captured pieces back on the board as your own, or move a piece normally. This means you have to keep an eye on what pieces an opponent has in reserve, as it's sometimes possible to maneuver everything into fairly innocuous looking positions, then checkmate your opponent by placing a single piece. The people I used to play with have moved to other cities and countries now. I'm getting really rusty

I made a start on Asterios Polyp just before bed last night (There's a preview of about 8 pages there). The artwork is absolutely incredible, I can't think of any other comic books that have mesmerised me like this.

I found out this week that a couple of guys I know used to work on phones for a utility company. They would sometimes put on American accents, and speak very slowly and clearly while pretending to be automated phone systems, saying things like: "If you are calling with regard to a County Court Judgment, say, NO JAIL" I would be pushing really hard at training this week since the half marathon is on the 13th, but I have a bloody cold and don't want to make it worse

I've ended up resorting to the same thing before, though there is also Soundcloud, which was apparently built by European DJs who were fed up of posting CDs to each other.

I think all of these comics can coexist, it's largely a matter of exposure for them. Non-superhero comics readers are who Page 45 call the real mainstream, and those people seem to be by far the majority of their customers just as those kind of comics are the majority of their stock. Marvel and DC going bust are acceptable thoughts to me, given my preferences, but the other stuff in comics is just going to have to fight the stereotypes created by the biggest publishers.

From an email to the Page 45 mailshot: EDIT: Also, I like their impromptu FAQ on the subject:

That one looks like the heightmap has had some effort put into it, and the clouds don't repeat. The others, not so much.

My boss met him once, and apparently, Tim was incredulous that he hadn't heard of him before. Everyone knows your name now, Tim! Way to go!

Fruit distributes seeds via the digestive system of whatever eats it.

I've been playing a bit of Carcassonne lately, and quite like it. It's a nice easy game to teach others, but there are still strategies to be discovered. I also bought a digital copy of My Life With Master, and am looking for a group of people to play it. It's looks excellent; the character attributes are weariness, self-loathing, and love. I like Fluxx less every time I play it. It basically seems to be a diversion for n minutes until someone happens to win, but we're finding it's rare for anyone to plan to and succeed in that plan. Marek asked once on Twitter why no game has a "race card". I think Fluxx would be the ideal game for something this capricious Me and some friends started this games night in Nottingham recently, and we've found that video games look damn anti-social when they're being played next to this kind of stuff. We'll apparently be trying Catan this month or next.

Not sure, googled it quickly last night, so may well be FUD. Apparently, it was patched out by the 22nd though.

Ah, I'm afraid Bowlby was one of the authors I got from libraries, so don't have it to hand, sorry. His series of books "Attachment and Loss" is fairly accessible IIRC. One other thing I'm pretty sure of is that the process of grieving can be halted and reversed before it's complete. With broken hearts in particular, I often feel a moment where hope ends; where I think "She's actually not interested", "this isn't going anywhere" or the like, and feel it resound much deeply than some throwaway conscious thought (<-- i.e. most of them are only designed for a particular moment, few of them go deep enough to affect your motives over time except by accretion). The girl I mentioned above put me there twice (without wanting to - Jesus that was the most complex romantic situation I've ever been in, and there weren't even any extra people involved) then came back to me each time, the second time a week had passed with me thinking it was over and getting on with stuff. I think even if you're feeling okay, it can take quite a lot of time and distance with someone you've loved before there's no chance of things sparking again. Thunderpeel, yes, I'd agree with your assessment of bite sized chunks too. Consciously chasing grief through understanding can speed it up and make it more bearable I think, but it still seems to be a regulated process.

People are being banned from XBL for exploiting it, but yeah, I expected the glitch to be absolutely nuked before most people even heard about it.

Everyone leaves Nottingham because it's shit

Hmm. Difficult, as it's all fused into a giant blob for me. Also, some of the writers I've read have massive axes to grind or publishers to placate. The most lucid might be John Bowlby on attachment theory and the process of grieving. He studied it in toddlers separated from their parents, and widows too, and found a similar emotional pattern in both groups: Initial agitation and disbelief following the separation/bereavement, and a subsequent settling into acceptance. The two states tend to run in diminishing cycles, and seem to be a response we have to any kind of loss (small losses = smaller grief, shorter timespans). The way I see it is that our unconscious holds values for things, that profoundly affect both our motivations and our expectations. These have to be robust to keep personalities, relationships and social groups stable, so we can't just get rid of them on a whim; they're simply not very consciously accessible. Sometimes though, the world alters around us and the values have inertia. Whether it's a broken heart, a bereavement, the end of a relationship or friendship, the loss of a treasured possession, a lost job, or a really good but missed opportunity*, we have to grieve for it in order to let go and reconcile ourselves to the new state of things. * I'm by no means saying these things are equivalent to each other, of course. Reality can change fast, and it can take a while for the unconscious to catch up*. While it's doing that, we have all kinds of tiny motives that are still primed for the way things were. *In the case of someone who stays limerent for the rest of their life, it possibly never does. 1st rule if I'm in love with someone and they're not interested: find a way to destroy all hope I have that's related to them, especially as being totally in love with someone has a habit of creating hope from the most slender of positive signals. Destroying hope like this has once even included getting a girl to look me in the eye and tell me she didn't love me, and would never want to be in a relationship with me. Hurt us both, but we're still friends. I'm not sure how much that might help you, as over the years I've mashed attachment theory together with a lot more on motivation theories, dimensional models of emotion, the biology and cultural history of romantic love, etc., but having a framework to understand whatever's going on internally whenever something has made me unhappy has helped enormously in the past decade or so. Grieving was probably the most important corollary to motivation theory I found, and understanding it probably the biggest help in getting over people in particular.