James

Happy two days ago.

Colours! Shadows! Reflections! Very cool.

Yeah, a few of them looked pretty neglected. We also saw a stray dog that appeared to have worms.

I went on holiday to Porto recently. There were loads of stray cats. This photo of one of them happened to come out quite well: Well, I thought so, anyway. Despite all the rubbish in the background.

INSUFFICIENT LOVE

WAIT. I feel cheated. Now I don't love anything.

OH NO I love your birthday.

I love me more.

I'm on holiday in Porto this week. I'm staying in a flat with a balcony. This is the view:

By that logic, how many words aren't some sort of euphemism? I'm no linguist, but it seems to me that an awful lot of words have at some point in their etymological history been constructed from words for simpler, more fundamental concepts (perhaps that's the wrong way of describing it – I'm not sure "spitting out" is a simpler or more fundamental concept than "vomiting" – but hopefully my meaning is clear enough).

I'm on 360. I played a bit with someone from the Thumbs crew a while ago, but I didn't recognize the name. Does "fryemaang" go by a different name here? Anyway, I'm quite enjoying Online, so if anyone else on 360 wants to team up at some point (not this week – on holiday), feel free to invite me or however it is it works. It'd be nice if a few of us could get together, but perhaps that will have to wait for the PC version.

You are a certified bugger. My favourite moment was having a phone conversation with my friend while everyone apparently took the merciless piss.

Sorry I didn't make it. The combination of a troublesome journey home from work, an unco-operative PC and a general state of exhaustion meant I really didn't have the energy for it. NEXT TIME.

Yeah, I was actually able to play a bit, although each session with my apparently being kicked. I'm not sure if that's the generic message for when you lose connection, or if people are kicking one another willy-nilly, but I did get a message about accruing bad sport points if I get kicked too often, so that's somewhat worrisome. Other than that, though, it seemed pretty fun.

All this is great, but none of it compares to the deeply unsettling car crash of emotions evoked in me by Big Dog's stumbling calf legs antics.

There's a lot of more significant stuff in your post that I'll leave for cleverer people to handle (is there any evidence that women in the army are under-performing?), but this one is easy: sports prizes are not salaries. They are, as someone already said, prestige-based awards. After all, these are competitions. Competitors aren't producing a commodity. By your logic the prize size should vary depending on the quality of play. That's not how competitions work. Whether the number of games played in either tournament is appropriate is another issue. I'd say that the right amount is a tournament long enough to push the competitors to their limit, but not so long that they're all utterly exhausted by the final. But I don't know much about sport, so that might be completely wrong.

To be double clear: Just because you have the option for Episodes on the main menu, it doesn't mean you actually have it. Try actually launching it to check.

That's brilliant.

I could be roused from my throne if required.

Is a session actually going to happen? I'm kind of busy watching Antiques Roadshow...

Benedict Cumberbatch is among the least believable of those names.

We didn't get around to doing the episodes in the end, because some of us didn't have the episodes after all, naming no names James, but it was a good session nevertheless. I'm impressed with how quickly YouTube processes videos these days:

It's a bit of a chore to manage all this video nonsense (mainly because my computer takes forever to encode anything of any real size, and I'm having trouble getting good editing software to work properly), but here's a highlight from last week: And a car that thinks it's a monster truck:

I should presumably be back from celebrating my nephew's birthday by then, and am in possession of both a) Episodes and The Greatest Musical Instrument Ever Devised (thanks for using its proper name, Mr Leego), so I will probably be able to attend.

The worst part is that the people who came up with those were probably really pleased with themselves.