James

LVI is a bigger number than LV. I currently have no data on whether it's better.

The game seemed cool at Eurogamer and Eljay seemed like a thoroughly nice guy when I sat around awkwardly not saying much at the Show and Yell thing, so I bought it. Congratulations for releasing a something.

Acccording to QI, that actually originated in the Not the Nine O'Clock News where Rowan Atkinson plays a gorilla ("Are you mad?" "Yes, livid", or something along those lines), but has since been adopted in a limited capacity by some biologists OR SOMETHING I FORGET THE PRECISE DETAILS VERY SORRY. I'm pretty sure it's Shaun of the Dead.

ONE TWO THREE FOUR I DECLARE THUMB WAR

Hey Groucho, don't mind those guys, shouting is awesome.

You probably never have; St Andrews is in Scotland. My dad went there! Books: I haven't made any progress in Gödel, Escher, Bach in ages. I'm tempted to start Persepolis, but if I do I'll probably never finish GEB.

No, like your shoulder. It's better for swivelling or something.

Gibbons are the only creature to have ball-and-socket joints in their wrists. That is probably my all-time favourite piece of trivia.

Yeah, we guessed something like that had happened.

Yesterday I saw an Evony advert that just showed buildings, no models at all. True story.

Aren't most of those vocations? Gaming is not a vocation, it's a pastime. I wouldn't call someone who goes out running every evening to unwind a runner; I would call someone who runs as a profession a runner. I guess you could call somebody who plays a musical instrument in a purely recreational capacity a musician, I guess. I don't see the interactive nature of games as being particularly relevant. For one thing, I think it's risky to say that that necessarily means that game-players are more "involved" than book-readers. You might not have any influence on the outcome, but you can be very involved when reading a book (or watching a film or whatever). I don't think it says anything more about me that I play games than it does that I watch films or read books or listen to music. I'm not ashamed of any of these things, but I don't like to identify myself in terms of them very much.

I saw Clash of the Titans last night. That film didn't benefit from being in 3D at all. You'd think the spectacle would be at least a little enhanced, in as much as 3D can enhance stuff, but for most of it I forgot it was even in 3D. I'm not a huge 3D fan or anything, but I reckon the at the bare minimum you want to at least notice it's in effect. Also, it needed more titans. By my count it had one titan and a few beasts of near-titanic proportion (those beasts were all of the same variety, mind). I was certainly not expecting greatness from this movie, but I was hoping for a series of cool giant monsters. I was quite disappointed in that respect. Also, excuse my ignorance of the original, but doesn't the title suggest titans should be fighting one another in something like a Greek mythology-flavoured variation of Godzilla fighting those other huge dudes, rather than being slain by puny humans?

I don't know if I'd say I hate it, but I'm certainly uncomfortable with it. It seems bizarre to me that people who like computer games have formed this community with very specific traits, labels (such as "gamer") and so on. I don't think you find that as much around other media. Perhaps it's because gaming is seen more as a hobby than something like watching films, but I'm not entirely satisfied with some people's willingness to identify themselves primarily by the fact that they play games. I spend probably altogether too much time playing games myself, but I don't feel like a "gamer" any more than I do a "filmer". I don't know, maybe I'm making a lot of fuss about nothing.

I'm fucking terrible at fighters, so I don't really mind.

Why hello there, the rest of the world.

My mum's Swedish, so she finds it amusing and peculiar how the English cast pronounce all the Swedish place names in British version (Norrköping as "nor coping" rather than something closer to "norsherping", for example, although my Swedish is near non-existent, so excuse me if I'm embarrassingly wrong). I've been meaning to give either version a proper watch, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. I saw part or maybe all of it when I was a little younger than that (in primary school, certainly), and it scared the shit out of me. I'm not sure exactly how much I saw in that first viewing, but I'm pretty sure it included a chest-burster, the scene when they can't work the sensor out because the aliens are in the vents, and Bishop getting so rudely bisected at the end. Oh, and someone in a vehicle being destroyed. As well as being terrified, I thought bits of it were pretty cool at the time, but I never watched it again until I got the quadrilogy box set on DVD, by which point the original was firmly established as my prototypical Alien film. I just couldn't take Aliens seriously. It didn't have any of the restraint of the original. I think I had more to say, but then I fell asleep at my laptop just now. All I can think of is that for every thing I like about Aliens, there is another film in the series that does it better. Usually it's the original.

I remember when tada.wav and chimes.wav were significant parts of my life. Oh, the past.

Yeah, I think I'm actually busy on the Sunday. I HAVE NO PUB NAMES I'M SORRY.

I'm pretty much with you there, but from what I can tell the rest of the world disagrees. I guess Aliens has been a significant influence on a lot of stuff I like and it has a lot of iconic scenes I remember from when I was young and shouldn't have been watching it, but it doesn't really do what I want from an Alien film, and isn't really to my taste in general. It's vastly better than the AvP movies, though.

I launched it a week or two ago with the intent of generating an amusing and bewildering pop-up for the Thumbs who couldn't agree on what game to play. It nearly killed my computer. All I saw was geometric shapes flickering on the screen. I was slightly worried that Id's mighty 1999 technology was too much for my graphics card and had killed it.

Those things are so cool, in their gently terrifying way. EDIT: Petman, too: 67CUudkjEG4 I'm becoming increasingly suspicious that Boston Dynamics will produce the leg that one day crushes the last remaining human skull into irradiated dust.

I have a shirt that has the word "SHIT" (among others) on it. I don't wear it much, though.

I assume you're referring to the rocket launcher launcher. And the ground.

Yeah, Wilder's great in it.

I forget the name. It's in an alley just around the corner from the Vue, I think.