James

Thanks. I dimly remembered something about it being shot open matte then masked afterwards or using video or something TV-related in that film his daughter made, but I didn't remember precisely what. It could explain the helicopter shadow thing, if I wasn't imagining that.

No man, you've got it all wrong. More degrees equals more enjoyment. Play Quake with fov 120! 360° vision would be gaming nirvana! Also, swap out textures for flat colours for maximal situational awareness and combat effectiveness. Was The Shining always shown in 4:3? When I watched it on DVD, I thought I spotted the helicopter's shadow at the bottom of the screen, and presumed they had transferred an unmasked version of an originally widescreen ratio. If it was always full frame, though, either it was an error on their part or one on mine. Anyway, I love films with strong visual styles, particularly Kubrikian stuff. I'm largely an idiot when it comes to films, though. I might post more about it later if I remember.

I haven't tried much note-taking on computers, as I didn't have a laptop until well after university, but for as much as I have tried it, it seemed far too linear, even for straightforward non-symbol-heavy stuff. I'm not a great note-taker anyway, though, so it may be more to do with that than anything else. It might also be a matter of technology. Is there any software specifically for the purpose, or do people just use word processors? It could even be a psychological thing. It could be that when I see an empty word processor page, I expect to fill it with paragraphed prose.

Check out my post a few pages back. Basically the film is two things: murderer child shock material and a coming-of-age-type comedy. While neither is categorically objectionable to me, neither is inherently appealing, and in this case they didn't really impress much. If I look past the stuff that specifically bothered me, it was fine, but not exactly remarkable.

Verily, they are at destitution's doorstep.

I say go 360. It looks better and more people are around for the multiplayer. A friend and I played a decent stint of the PS3 version last night (sorry Forza guys), exclusively in free roam. We started out doing gang hideouts in a private game, but then joined a public game and harassed people. It felt like borderline griefing, but it's also kind of in character and appropriate to the setting. Besides, it was all in good fun, and we were killed as much as we killed others. One kid was really whining about it, though. Anyway, I think we should spend some time in public free roam.

YOUR FAMILY NEEDS A SITE LICENCE. MICROSOFT WILL BE IMPOVERISHED AND ITS EMPLOYEES WILL GO HUNGRY UNLESS YOU BUY A SITE LICENCE.

If anything, the Internet enhances my ability to be awkward. It truly is a marvelous thing.

No, it's just when I read back the sarcastic laughter and stuff about typos being OK regardless of what causes them it seemed like I was having a go at you. No secret bilious ranting, I'm afraid. For the record, I'm typing this post on my phone's hardware keyboard, which is still probably best for anything long (not that this is that).

He may be new to this game, but he's an old hand at being party leader in GTA. Perhaps he's getting a feel for Rockstar's ... unique approach to multiplayer lobby design. Anyway, I had a lot of fun. Sorry if I got a bit whiny towards the end there. I was enjoying myself really. What's the plan for future sessions? I would be free most evenings if they weren't already taken for other Thumbs games. Also, I recommend perhaps spending a little more time in free roam next time. We could give the achievement a go, and generally move around as a group a bit more. Only if you guys want, of course. It could be quite cool in a public game, though, I think.

a) HAR HAR HAR The alternative explanation was that I made a simple typo, which is really equivalent to this, so you probably would have been overreacting anyway c) That's OK. I'm as bad if not worse about that stuff d) I'm not really sure about overall speed gain. It feels quite fluid, but I suspect a lot of the time saved is lost on fishing around correcting errors and entering stuff outside the format it favours. You can use it like the default keyboard, which is good for entering words not in the dictionary (and adding them to the dictionary is very quick and easy), but its support for non-alphabetic characters is quite poor. Some fairly significant stuff like square brackets are entirely absent, as far as I can tell. There should be a catch-all list when you long-press on the punctuation key or something. Or it could replace the superfluous smiley button. Another peeve is that it auto-inserts a space before every ne word, even if it comes after a hyphen. There is a literal mode that disables that, but it's fiddly to turn it on and off every time I want to hyphenate something. e) Enough moaning. I've been using it for a while now, so it must be good. Like I said, I'm not convinced it makes me much faster (although it's probably a bit better than the default keyboard, and I imagine I'll improve as I go), but it's a more pleasant way to type overall, I think, and it's easier (but still tricky) to type one-handed. I've heard out claimed that it makes it possible to type blind, but I'm having to manually correct way too much stuff for that to be realistic. Anyway, overall it's pretty good. Incidentally, that's also the reason for my bizarre message on Twitter yesterday. EDIT: Woah, the start of this post reads way more confrontational than I intended. I'm not actually angry, 'blix! We are pals and everything is OK!

Yes, that was the joke he was making. I generally post using my phone, on which I've recently been trying out ShapeWriter, which is an alternative touch keyboard along the same lines as that Swipe thing the T9 guy invented. Because of the way it works, it guesses at double letters. Unfortunately, some words follow the exact same pattern, such as "fell" and "feel". It picked the wrong one, and I failed to proofread my message (obviously). On the subject of exercise and healthy living, I should probably do some odd that. I'm naturally skinny, and left to my own devices I often put of eating for most of the day, but when I get bored at work I keep snacking to pass the time (not that it passes much time) and I get bored at work quite a lot, so I now have a belly disproportionate with the rest of me. The problem is that I'm pretty lazy and weak-willed so I barely even entertain the thought of exercise or dieting.

On Saturday my friend and I found another flat superior to the one that feel through. The main downside is that it's not available until mid-July. The rooms are pretty massive for the area, though, and the bedrooms are of equal size, avoiding the messy issue of deciding who gets the better one. All in all, pretty good. I expect it'll all go wrong somehow, though. We'll find ourselves without utilities for months, or, even worse, unable to access high-speed Internet. Or one of us will die before July. I can't possibly be engaging in a real-life activity.

So this is all my doing? I hope the recipient is grateful!

If you're referring to what I think you are, I believe most of the technology is in the pen.

Yeah! Something along those lines! Something that doesn't make me feel guilty!

The soothing music is not helping me keep a hold of the distinction between living things and robots at all.

Oh shit, how did I miss this? I love Stars of the Lid! They make me excited about music in a way that few artists manage. I used one of their pieces in one of my stupid Left 4 Dead videos: x_uclf56O0M The silly juxtaposition is probably an insult to a wonderful piece of music. Anyway, here are two of my favourite ever album openers. Video content is incidental: NaLW8R4m8iU zSOFCQMNkRg I'm tempted to post more, but I guess by this stage if anybody's interested, they've heard enough to investigate on their own. It's a shame I couldn't find a full version of December Hunting for Vegetarian Fuckface, though. That's another favourite. It used to be on Last.fm, but they seem only to have a preview now. Anyway, yeah, they're great. Good on you, Nachimir!

So I now have the game, and have just finished spending all day playing it. I'm very ready for multiplayer. LET'S DO SOME OF THAT. But when? I'm kind of thinking Tuesday's GTA session is proven to be good for a lot of us, and that perhaps we should do RDR instead this week, but perhaps that would piss people off.

Hey, it's Falco from mclusky's new (as in non-defunct) band! I'm pretty fond of mclusky.

Weird story: one time something was being delivered to me by UPS or DHL or someone along those lines, and the delivery man saw I was wearing a Rock Action Records T-shirt, and asked if I was familiar with 65daysofstatic. I said I was, but not very much. This is still accurate. An old Internet friend who I had a brief catch-up with claimed his band supported them live at some point. Recently it's been Venetian Snares and μ-ziq for me, with a bit of ex-BoC man christ.. I actually found myself going over some old posts in this thread the other day, and was reminded of our exchange on the subject. I still haven't gotten around to giving much of his Matt Smith stuff a listen, which is stupid, because Third Eye Foundation is one of my favourite artists. I'd recommend everyone give some TEF a listen, but I suspect it wouldn't be to many people's taste.

Happy Thunderday Birthpeel!

On the way to work this morning a colleague and I decided that the wars of the future will be fought with BigDogs and synthetic bacteria. Well, we'd a already decided on the BigDog thing, but we augmented it with BIOLOGICAL MAYHEM.

Elika is basically an extremely aggressive checkpointing system. Checkpointing is fine, but having one at every jump is kind of like quicksaving before taking any meaningful action, which a lot of people see as a lame way to play games. I'm generally quite quicksave-happy, but doing it to that degree did kind of cheapen things for me. But as I said in the big post in the old thread, that wasn't my main problem with the game.

I don't know about sweet ones, but here are two clips of some description or nondescription: An exhibition of my masterful artistic capabilities: G80c0Cb7TI&hl=en_GB&fs=1&hd=1 Battering ram: GVMxQCqHjvQ&hl=en_GB&fs=1&hd=1 The top video isn't showing up for me at the moment. Hopefully it will emerge at some point. It's not that exciting, mind.