Nachimir

Yes! It is time for Santasm. Again.

If you like Justice, you'll probably enjoy Teenage Bad Girl, also signed to Ed Banger. GIwTdUENewo

Been a while. This was the time (yesterday) I cycled six miles through the driving snow to deliver christmas toys for orphans: One of many reasons to stay off roads in those conditions: Riding down a long, gritted hill into town through a snowstorm, thinking "This snow tastes funny" then immediately realising it's because it's mixing with spray from the car in front.

I did not know that :0 Now I do

This went straight on my Christmas list after reading a review and seeing a few people talk about it so persistently on Twitter.

"50% of respondents had a really bad memory for faces."

Very nice! You make me feel so lame, because someone surprised me with a triple wick fire staff for my birthday, and I still haven't made time to learn any good tricks with it.

I was just about to post that, because I shot it. The people they named in the demo were all other speakers at the event I'm pretty excited about Subversion. They've bit off an awful lot to chew on in making it, and I hope they can do something as iconic as Darwinia with the heist gameplay. In the time since Chris first showed the city generator publicly, entire companies have sprung up and started belting out middleware to do exactly the same thing.

Tramadol Nights was pretty good. Some very dark jokes, and it put me off when he walked on and did the typical stand up thing of mocking people, but on the whole: Just remember, if you ever find yourself on the front row of a standup gig, your name is Chris, you're from Northampton, and you work with kids who have special needs. There's so much that's boring or unmockable there that's like Kryptonite, though I reckon someone like Frankie might give it a go.

I hope your move has gone well Miffy. There's lots of snow here. I live in a valley so steep that the bus company just don't bother when it snows. I put some nobbly tyres on the mountain bike, let the pressure out until they were quite soft, and went for a blast in the woods and around the edge of the local golf course, which has this lovely steep hill among others. Got some shouts of "What the fuck?" from people on sledges Traction isn't so bad in snow; it's like wet mud. Ice makes the hill climbs interesting though. Got to practice handling skids until my back brake iced up, and learned a little about effective climbing. I expected it all to be sketchier and was shit scared at first, so had the full face helmet and ski goggles on, but even on fast downhills the tyres only float around a little. As long as you plan ahead it feels fine. I'm very pleased to have taken up snowboarding and returned to mountain biking this year, the latter has especially filled a void. The two crashes I had in recent months underlined my limits/lack of caution, but I still feel a massive need to hurtle. I'm also building up a good toolkit and find it quite meditative to take things apart, clean and fix them.

It's neither! It's both! Anyone stating that there's only one correct term is completely ignorant of the natures of both English, and language. It's a living thing that evolves over time, often unrecognisable over the span of centuries. Different tweaks can happen very fast though. English is absolutely packed with compound terms that we all accept without qualm. Cheesecake, shoelace, fireball, bedtime, pigtail, bookworm, lighthouse, upstairs, doorbell, mudguard, gemstone, handbag, buttfuck: "Video game" is as correct as "video game" or "video-game". If you're running a magazine, newspaper, or website like Gamasutra, then having a style guide that keeps your news items and articles consistent and professional looking is a good thing. Confusing any given style guide for an objective form of correctness is a feat of ignorance and deserves a resounding "Fuck you". I seriously want this debate to fuck off and die. Steve Gaynor had this to say on Twitter the other day to someone asking about "Video game" versus "video game": What the fuck? That doesn't even make sense, but like "gameplay versus graphics" it's a prime example of just how inbred games industry discourse can become. It actually makes me angry to see otherwise intelligent game developers and journalists wasting their time on it. It's trivial bullshit that ignores thousands of years of history stacked in opposition. Very, very few, if any people outside the games industry give a blood soaked shit about the "correct" form for Video game, but it seems likely that by sheer weight of repetition it will become a single word like many compound terms before it. The industry faces far more pressing and important issues, and the only obnoxious thing in this recurring linguistic debate is picking a given compound or non-compound term and telling everyone else it's the right one, presuming that this whore of a tongue can be tamed and made rational. Language doesn't work like that, especially not English which is one of the most muddled, deep rooted and culturally promiscuous languages on the planet. A few days after we'd been discussing this at work, someone pointed out Stephen Fry's latest podcast, on language. It's excellent, listen to it.

I definitely have the habit of hoarding things in games. I never want to use the really powerful, rare stuff because, indeed, there might be something bigger beyond the thing I'm up against right now.

Kolzig, that looks excellent. Also, woo: My local arthouse cinema are screening it from the 17th.

+1 rad dude reference for Toblix. I sent him my address, and many months later he has still not flown over, chopped me up with an axe and buried the pieces.

Would doing so fix any of these problems?

Interesting. The last one in the trailer also appears like it might have Tim's face

The first Xbox targeted hardcore gamers, and made them a $4 billion loss. They really turned things around with the 360 (A lot of that has been to do with work done at Rare on the new dashboard and Kinect). It made sense that MS would be willing to operate at a loss to establish themselves in games, but the way they've pushed beyond the traditional games market has been quite incredible. I also think it's interesting that the two studios they kept beyond the first Xbox have had hefty amounts of their resources directed into technology rather than games. They've done some incredible business, and design too, which I never would have expected of Microsoft 10 years ago. Maybe Squid is talking about technology though

Holy fuck, they're a police unit with the motto "We know no mercy and do not ask for any." I googled and this came up: http://exiledonline.com/moscows-finest-stomp-arrest-annoying-greenpeace-mascot/ The blogger has an annoyingly crowing tone, but basically the guy in the costume tried to deliver a toy garbage truck and a letter to the mayor, and got arrested instead. Can't find anything on what happened to him, or any context on why he was arrested.

:tup: Totally in favor of this idea. Occasionally revisiting one of the old build worlds would be a really nice variation, and also a pretty good constraint: Having an idea that's too troublesome to build in survival, then having an occasional weekend to do it in a sandbox.

Helsing's Fire is a jolly super game. Apparently HD for the retina display on the iphone 4, so might work in HD on ipad too. If you like The Amazing Screw On Head, puzzle games, and the premise of Waldschattenspiel, then you'll probably like this game. It has torchlight, the undead, and gentlemanly banter.

Heh, well spotted that man

Misfits really is pretty good. ASBO kids with super powers and little motivation to be virtuous.

This is how I feel, and why I spent a few hours casting and mining obsidian last night (also, figuring out how to cast and harvest from a vein of lava five deep in places was a fairly interesting puzzle). I think the block duplication is a personal thing. I did it on the last server, and didn't really care when someone frowned on it. I wouldn't frown on anyone else doing it now, but I want to do everything in this world in a more disciplined way.

With the mining, I'm finding that keeping your pick lined up with where the block was for just a little longer makes it disappear permanently, even if it reappears for a fraction of a second. Not a bad first night's haul: Enough diamonds for a pick and spade, and two stacks of obsidian (no resource duping).