James

Perhaps I'm behind the audiovisual times, but a lot of the presentation seemed to be semi-serious. When I reconstruct it in my mind, though, I can totally see it being cartoony. It may be that I was conditioned by my friend's reservations, which he (quietly) vocalized. Or it might just be my instinctive reaction to what was going on. I didn't find that element of it funny enough not to think about it in serious terms (other parts were sufficiently funny, however). It sounds almost like we wanted it to go in completely opposite directions.

Yeah, it's pretty rough, but I still liked Dwayne to some degree, which I couldn't say for Playboy. I guess I hoped Dwayne might someday find happiness, whereas I doubted Playboy would ever become less annoying.

That's glorious.

I was going to post about this on my phone at work, but apparently I forgot to hit "submit". Anyway, yeah, that definitely adds an eerie quality. The rationale behind omitting a lot of the apostrophes was less obvious to me, though, particularly since it didn't appear to be entirely consistent. Not a knock on the book by any means – I'd be crazy to criticize it for something so cosmetic – but it was an observation I made. Also, was it just me, or was the choice of prepositions a little unusual at times? I may be misremembering, but I think phrases such as "at the floor" rather than "on the floor" were used. I wasn't sure whether this was meant simply to add a slightly alien quality, or to represent the gradual loss of language through underuse, or if it was a simple matter of dialect (possibly not even deliberately unusual). Anyway, a fantastic book. Much more effective than the film, which was good itself.

My dad had a habit of getting me cool comedy tapes when I was younger, and I'd listen to them in bed before going to sleep. One of them was a Tom Lehrer collection, of which I was very fond. Parts of it are so ingrained in my mind that, on reading the phrase "spring is here" on another forum, my immediate thought was this: 4HVsgAWdQX8

Also, me being all whiny and awful like I always am these days! And a joker! Also also, it was Battle Raper 2.

So depressed people would be better off dead? I killed Playboy X and never regretted it.

I guess I just don't get fluff, then. I don't know, I suppose it was the presentation of the violence that separated it from fluff for me. I would say that South Park is generally actually about something other than violence and swearing, though. I'll probably have to watch it again.

Oh yeah, some moron from the Internet was around taking photos, right. I KID. You did the top of my head justice.

That spider thing is fantastic. Don't worry though, I won't quote it.

Lots of people have said similar, and it's obvious why, but the two have completely different tones for me. Fallout 3 is, if anything, almost too optimistic for me. For an apocalyptic wasteland, there's loads of people. It makes complete sense from a gameplay perspective, and I guess the idea is that humanity is possibly starting to recover a little, but I find it softens the impact a little. The Road, on the other hand, is the most uncompromisingly bleak situation I've ever encountered. It does contain an element of hope on some level, though, somehow, so reading it wasn't quite as draining an experience as American Psycho, which was really depressing (although ultimately worthwhile, I think).

Funnily enough, I was also listening to when I read this thread, and had just finished contemplating the particularly delightful nature of the combination when I came to this post. The BigDog is up-beat about slaying us all.But yeah, he definitely has a spring in his step after righting himself.

More like

My friend and I had planned to co-op it on PS3, but it's looking like more of you are going 360... I may do the idiotic thing at get both.

Kick-Ass I didn't feel Kick-Ass really justified the whole child-committing-horrible-violence thing. Does this mean I'm becoming a Daily Mail reader type of guy? It's not that I flat-out object to the idea of it being in a film, or that I have any problem with the actress participating in it (or the swearing, for that matter), but it seems to me that if you want to tread on such provocative territory, you have to have something to say about it, which as far as I could tell the film did not. There is one thirty-second bit of dialogue where a single character acknowledges that the girl is having her childhood robbed from her, and that what her father is doing is deeply twisted, to which there is no response and no further reference is made. I don't mind messed up films (I liked Happiness, for example), but it seems exploitative to have that kind of stuff in there just because somebody thought it was a cool idea (like the monster rape scene in one of those Hills Have Eyes remakes). Perhaps I'm a massive prude or inconsistent or something. Anyway, I didn't hate Kick-Ass by any means, but I don't find the concept of a child slicing people up inherently funny (although the training bit at the beginning is pretty funny, which might say something disturbing about me: violence committed by children is bad, but violence visited on children is good?), and the film doesn't seem to have anything meaningful to say in general. Not that all films have to have a message, by any means, but if you start out with the borderline accusatory tone of the opening rhetorical question – why doesn't anyone choose to be a hero? – it seems to me that you've set yourself up to directly address the audience. But the film (as with most superhero stories) is concerned almost exclusively with vigilante violence, and it gets less realistic as it goes on. It starts out in something approximating our world, deliberately contrasting itself with the world of super-powers and so on, but ends up with . I kind of feel like you can't have it both ways. Mark Millar has said that he feels the film shows more consequence to the violence than most action films, as the lead spends six months in hospital. Whilst I agree that it's a good thing that he is shown to be vulnerable, all we see of the six months is Kick-Ass emerging at the other end . What I don't feel there is much of is psychological consequence. Nobody seems especially disturbed by the horrendous things that take place. Upset, perhaps, but nothing in the long term.

My stupid brain: "Hey, that's me!" "Oh wait."

It's not exactly my face (I'm the one turned the other way), and it's not "with" in the sense of "hey here's me and my buddy posing for this rad photo", but this is me AND OTHERS in the presence of BMB: The tops of people's heads is what you were after, yeah? Well whatever, points for OssK and bbX1138 and Eljay I supose. Alternatively, here's a blurry impression of what I looked like a couple of years ago before I cut my hair: I'm the guy on the left in the awesome Darth-Vader-with-guitar Mogwai T-shirt that you can't see properly. With me is a friend who I hadn't seen since university. He has a bottle of beer between his legs and is excited.

It's true, I fucking love the BigDog. I'm like the anti-Jake on this subject. I can't wait for my inevitable demise at the paws of a glorious quadrupedal automaton.

I choose to interpret that as ominous.

Yeah, sorry, I keep missing things. I intend to attend, then I get distracted, and before I know it it's 11 pm.

You will be able to stab me with a tiny ninja sword, if that's what you're after. I haven't tried anything other than free-for-all deathmatch.

I'm pretty sure you get them faster if you kill some dudes. And cash it in with explosions or something.

My friend got a PS2 SOCOM game really cheap that had a USB headset that works fine for him. I might be up for this and/or LBP, depending. I've been missing a lot of Thumbs multiplayer stuff recently, though, and I feel guilty.

Yeah, I really like how it feels when you have all the movement stuff unlocked. Unfortunately I was no able to do that in a proper game against fleshy people because I'm not yet very good. I seemed to be getting better at the end of my last match, but it may just have been that the good people were leaving.

Uh... Fried gold? At 108 years old, SOMEBODY Rogers is the world's oldest child.