James

Somebody once recommended a bunch of bands for me to investigate, of which they were one, and I did, and I enjoyed them, but have completely failed to get anything more. I'd kind of forgotten about them, but I'll keep them in mind when I finally get around to buying a load of stuff. On the subject of Blonde Redhead: oUPBj6yso3g And now, remixed by The Third Eye Foundation: Yp3580zvtXg That's pretty much the extent of my knowledge of the band, but it's pretty great.

I'd like to add my condolences and respect and obligatory impotent inability to formulate a sentiment profound enough. Keep it up and don't lose hope, I suppose.

For a while I've found the concept of wetting other people's pants funny.

Hahahahahahahahahahahaha oh christ, sorry. AM NOT GOOD WITH SPORTSPEOPLE. But yes, that's obvious. The irony is excruciating.

His name is also Michael J. Perhaps that's a joke. I've been noticing a few people IN COMMENTS AND SUCH calling him "Michael Jacksons". Surely the man was famous enough for people to remember his name.

He definitely said Zeno Clash. Perhaps the weeekend hasn't officially started yet.

See, most of the music I like is from within the past 25 years, but the stuff that really moves me is pretty far removed from what Michael Jackson did, I think.

I don't feel anything anything other than mild surprise. There's a lot of stuff I don't feel anything about, though. It's significant, yes, but it hasn't personally affected me. Sorry, I won't admit it. You're projecting. I don't even go to clubs, because I don't like them. That probably means I'm uncool and socially maladjusted, but it also means that I can genuinely admit that I've never been at all into Michael Jackson. I will openly admit that this was probably largely contrarianism on my part, not least because my sister was heavily into his music, and I was heavily into not liking anything my sister did, and I will also freely admit that some of his songs are undeniably well written and competently performed (others were utterly tedious, however), but the fact remains that the man just wasn't that significant to me, and he didn't have this transcendental appeal you're implying as far as I'm concerned. See, I understand your appreciation of the man, but this reaction is completely alien to me, and I think that perhaps you're projecting your feelings about him onto the world at large. Or maybe I just have no interest in music. I thought I did, but it turns out I was just fooling myself all this time.

The weird post-modern e-mail at the end was great, although it sounds like there should have been more of it.

I'm not particularly perceptive about this sort of stuff, but from what I remember you can quite easily pinpoint where that film falls to pieces.

I guess I never really paid him much attention. I'd basically forgotten about him, so he might as well have been dead for the past few years. I mean, clearly it's good for him that he wasn't, and it's not good that he's died, but this isn't more Earth-shaking to me than any other high-profile celebrity death (which isn't especially much).

Yeah, watching the video it's obvious that I keep grabbing the wrong spongy control, but at the time I was just so damn excited I didn't really know what I was doing. Perhaps you need some Valve-style intensive play-testing. Yeah, sorry, seeing it there I presumed it was meant to be used. It was worth it for the hilarious comic timing, though. I took off and half a beat later this massive and complex structure comes crashing onto my head with great speed. That's what I thought the "LOLZ" was about. Is that thing meant to tilt like that, by the way? Incidentally, how awful was my pronunciation of the title, and what does it mean? Google Translate reckons "Hey on a snei". Going by my very limited knowledge of Swedish, which I guess is kind of a little bit similar in parts or something, that makes sense ("hei" is not too far from "hej", and "en" means "one" so I guess that can mean "a" as well), except for the bit where it didn't bother to translate the last word.

My main regret so far is going for Bloody Mess. I held off for ages, but decided to give it a try. Shooting a guy's head off with a hunting rifle is satisfying enough; if his limbs inexplicably detach themselves, it kind of leaves the domain of cool and enters the land of the ridiculous. I guess that'll serve me right for thinking bloody violence is cool in the first place.

That's that Alien Ant Farm song, right?

I LIKED THE BIT WHERE A LARGE PART OF THE LEVEL FELL ON MY HEAD. I DID NOT LIKE THE BIT WHERE MY CAR BLEW UP AND I RESPAWNED BEFORE A GATE THAT ONLY OPENED FOR CARS. I INITIALLY LIKED THE BIT WHERE I THOUGHT THE CAR WAS A GOATSE, BUT THE REALIZATION THAT IT WAS NOT WAS A DISAPPOINTMENT. We should multiplay it sometime.

So here's that video I think I mentioned: RS6LLj2i6rA YEAH THAT'S RIGHT, THAT'S AS FAR AS IT GOES. I would have been more thorough, but I had to go and play Left 4 Dead with some cretinous losers from the Internet.

OK, after going crazy with fully upgraded Infamous Megawatt Hammers (with all the little secondary explosions) with that karma burst thing on, things did slow down pretty unpleasantly. Still, in getting that number of explosions on the screen I'd pretty much put myself in a situation in which I would not be moving anyway, and I don't think it was unplayable slow, just unattractively so.

It also stays loud for ages. Or is that one of the other dance music tents that isn't actually called the Dance Tent?

Do you mind if I reuse that quote for every sequel I have any interest in? "Hey James, what do you think about the prospect of a sequel to Mirror's Edge?" "Definitely looking forward to this game. I hope they fix all the things I didn't like about Mass Effect. They won't, so I hope they fix some of them."

Miffy is Canadian and into motorcycles. Perhaps he's your man.

OH THANK FUCK. OK, here goes: The PS3 actually has it all customizable in the menus, I'd just never checked, so all I had to do was have both the HDMI and the composite cable that was included with the system plugged in, then plug the red and white left and right channels into my hi-fi. I'm at work right now (beavering away diligently, as you can tell), so I can't check, but it should be pretty obvious in the audio settings. For the 360 it was a bit fiddlier, because the included multi-purpose cable has a fucking massive connector, possibly deliberately intended to cover up the surrounding ports. However, on looking it up online, it turns out all you really need to do is come at it with a knife and hack the grey casing off. After that you can wedge both it and an HDMI cable in at once, and although the 360 cable will be a little skew-whiff, it'll work fine. There isn't any setting on the system to determine where it outputs its sound, but it just worked, so I guess maybe it outputs through all ports at once. I should caution that after messing about with the cabling a bit to plug things into other things, it suddenly became determined that the sound should be output through the HDMI only, or not at all, and I had to muck about more-or-less at random for twenty minutes or so to get it back how it was (I couldn't tell you what it was that actually did it), but if you don't tinker about at all you should be fine. You just need an audio device that takes standard phono input, or even a phono-to-3.5 mm adaptor or something. I believe there are also cables you can get that split audio off from HDMI or something, but I didn't want to be paying money or waiting or leaving the house in order to just play games with decent sound. (Yeah, I typed that all out before paranoia fully struck.) It's the one where I have to change the pyjamas but not the sheets.

OH CHRIST, IT'S JUST LIKE THAT DREAM I KEEP HAVING.

Is that a genuine request, or did I say something dumb? The emoticon confuses me.

Yeah, I'm really pleased with my 24" Iiyama monitor, but the in-built speakers are absolute shit. Anyway, the volume gradient of the speakers goes from 0, which is silent, to 1, which is too loud not to disturb people at night, to 100, which is too quiet for general use. And the quality is crap. So, weirdly enough, is that of the headphone pass-through port. But I'd never planned on using the in-built speakers anyway, and only tried them because I couldn't work out a way to get the video for my consoles by HDMI but the audio by analogue (I've since managed this).

I played this last Tuesday, and have A REPORT INCOMING when eventually I can be bothered to do a thing. Don't be excited.