James

Obligatory conical YouTube thread. I SAID OBLIGATORY.

Also, not all time zones fall at exact hour intervals (some are half an hour out). ----- I have this game. I haven't played it in ages, though. I declare tentative interest. Not to worry if it's all full up or whatever.

Yeah, the PDA thing doesn't seem to change the URL at all. It must be cookie-based or something. Also, when trying this on my phone, it came up with a login button. I didn't think it was possible to post in that view, but I thought "why not?", and attempted to log in, but that just kept throwing me back to the same screen, so I don't know what's up with that.

Hahahaha, quite. I find it a little weird how people are obsessed with categorizing themselves. I suppose people seek a sense of community, but it comes at the cost of distancing themselves from everyone else, either implicitly or explicitly. It's like how people who fight in wars apparently know a kind of brotherhood (or sisterhood) inaccessible to everyone else, but have to be in a situation where everyone's trying to kill someone to get it; to really connect with one group of people, do we have to dehumanize another? I don't know if these thoughts are really properly connected.

Hey, me too. Post apocalyptic wasteland is weirdly appealing to me. The non-green version doesn't look devastated enough, to me. For the record, I'm playing the game on my 360, but I use my computer monitor for my consoles (I don't have an actual HDTV), so I'm sitting inches from it at my desk. I haven't actually played the game in ages. I loved it when I started back when it was released, then I eventually had to drag myself away to play some of the other games that had come out, and I haven't returned to it yet. I will, though.

THEN IT'S A DATE provided I remember and so on.

The first series is brilliant. The second series was good too, but I didn't think it was quite as good or unique. Judging by that trailer, both series are being shown, so everybody wins. You can, of course, watch the entire first series quite easily on YouTube, as all episodes other than the pilot are under ten minutes long (and the aforementioned pilot is probably too long for the format). Anyway, everybody should watch it, because for some reason my opinion is important. No, 1 am is not an unreasonable hour. Shut up. Thants for your attention on this matter.

In terms of religious belief, I describe myself as an atheist, because I specifically believe there is no god. I don't claim to know definitively, but I'm in no more doubt than I am about my being the subject of a real-world Truman Show or something. It could be the case, but I believe it isn't, so I wouldn't describe myself as agnostic. So yes, my beliefs are atheist, but I don't identify as an atheist any more than I identify as a gamer. I just don't feel particularly connected to either community, in as much as either group is a community. I play games and I believe there is no god, but I don't think either defines me. Perhaps I'm just averse to being pigeon-holed, and have some sort of arrogant idea of individuality. I guess I'm more of a gamer than an atheist; after all, I spend more of my life playing games than thinking about religion, and am a member of a gaming forum but not an atheism one. Where's this going? Nowhere in particular. I have nothing interesting to add. EDIT: "In some states, atheists are barred from public office." Is this true? If so, that's pretty fucked up.

How would one (me) go about getting into such a thing?

I saw a programme about a grey parrot with roughly the intellect of a two-year-old. I was pretty impressed.

Hahahaha, fantastic. I wonder what makes birds dance. Maybe they're horny or furious or terrified or something. I guess they sing, so they have brain structures dedicated to music in some sense. That stuff's associated with mating, so I'm going to go ahead and assume Snowball had the cockatoo equivalent of a raging hard-on the whole time.

As far as I'm concerned, the end of MGS4 is alternately awesome and awful. Contrast this with World at War, which manages to be both simultaneously.

I've never actually met any real-life people who've even heard of him, but he pops up around the place. My first encounter was on the Mogwai remix album, then Lions Writing the Bible was in the Chris Morris series Jam. I thought it was really interesting, and although it turned out not to be a particularly representative sample of his work, I was greatly impressed.

If I remember reading about the whole deal second-hand correctly, SPISPOPD actually started as a joke amongst people waiting for Doom (I think it was a parody of the hype surrounding Doom), then someone took the name and made it into a game, and the cheat code was probably a reference to the joke rather than a game. My main first-hand memory of the affair was being relieved when Doom II changed the code to the much easier "idclip". For some reason I didn't just write the old one down. I was an idiot child who probably shouldn't have been playing those games in the first place.

It's like Christmas and a satisfying crotch scratch, all rolled into one! At least, I presume it is.

The weird thing is that you couldn't get away with going on for so long about specific things in films or TV shows. Or any other game, really. It's kind of cool that someone who can do insane stuff like that actually does, but there's definitely a reason why it's considered so insane. I mean, not to spoil things too much, but the non-interactive portion at the end of the game goes on for way longer than either other medium could support. The climax happened hours ago! Roll the damn credits! I did like the game, though, despite its numerous faults (I can't get over how people take a game which jokes about a man shitting himself so seriously). I even went so far as to get whichever medal it was that requires you to play through it in a couple of hours without getting seen or anything. The fact that time wasn't actually a major concern really drove home quite how much of that game is consumed by cutscenes and so on. Of course, knowing what you're doing also helps a lot. For me, the best thing about MGS4 will always be those adverts at the beginning. They were so unexpected, so brilliantly made, and so bizarre. I wish there was more of that sort of thing integrated into the main game itself. That would interest me way more than all the conspiracy stuff. Also, Nazi Drew is a fantastic creation, on a linguistic level if nothing else.

I do love the idea of a one-man group splitting up, which is why I describe the event as such. I haven't heard much of the pre-Ghost stuff, but I've been pretty into what I have heard. I'd recommend going straight for Collected Works, which is Ghost, You Guys Kill Me and Little Lost Soul, plus a few bonus tracks, some of which are pretty good, for relatively cheap (at least, it has been whenever I've seen it). But then, that might seem a little excessive for someone who's undecided. PERHAPS YOU COULD HAPPEN TO HEAR SOMETHING IN YOUR TRAVELS ONLINE COMPLETELY BY ACCIDENT BEFORE DECIDING TO MAKE THE MODEST INVESTMENT, you hypothetical bastards. The latter is much more somber without the sinister electronic harshness [...]I really love it, but I often can't bear to listen to Lost. It's not that it's much sadder than other music I listen to; it's just such a monolith of sadness, right there in the middle of the album (well, maybe not the exact middle), for some reason I often feel like I can't face it at that point in time. Then the bonus disc on the Collected Works version has two remixes of it in a row, just to drive the point home. I haven't yet gotten around to properly listening to any of the Matt Elliot stuff. I will do at some point. Eventually. Incidentally, after posting those links above, I found a compilation on Last.fm that has most of its tracks available in full: You Gotta Get More Alive

I don't know, without language it would be pretty hard to organize most abstract thoughts, I'd have said. The specifics are incidental, to a certain extent, but without sufficient vocabulary, it would, I think, be very difficult to get very far with one's thoughts.

I've encountered that a few times before, one time on the radio, even (Radio 4, no less!). I really like it. It's so endearingly demented. Have you heard its opposite counterpart, The Most Wanted Song? It's pretty tedious. I'm pretty sure the whole project was a deliberate satire on the modern obsession with focus groups and demographic targeting, but I've seen it presented in both ways in various places, which I thought was fairly interesting. Do all your shopping ... AT WAL-MART! Actually, no, I've never heard of [PRONOUN]. I don't do enough music buying or research. Occasionally I'll go on a bit of a spree and find a bunch of cool stuff I'd never heard before, and then I'll leave it at that for months, which makes it annoying when I suddenly want to hear more stuff that sounds like something. Anyway, I'll look into that. I will look into these, also, if I manage to remember all those words. Additional music mention: I really like The Third Eye Foundation. It's kind of sinister beats-based yet not-particularly-electronic-sounding music. Well, some of it is sinister. Or atmospheric. Or something. The rest is just plain good. I'm still no good at talking about music. OK, how about some songs with "fuck" in the title but not in the song itself: Fog - Fuckedupfuckfuckup (preview) Stars of the Lid - December Hunting for Vegetarian Fuckface (full song)

I particularly like the intro to A Town Test Site. On the subject of crazy music with some sort of Japanese connection, I quite like Melt Banana, who (if you don't know) are a Japanese band who do some pretty frantic, fast, loud, often fairly disjointed music. I saw them live, and they were supported by DJ Scotch Egg, who makes shouty music on great big fat original black-and-white Gameboys. I saw him again another time in a small pub and it was fun. Then I had to leave because there would be no more trains, and we missed the train anyway and had to get the bus. On the subject of what I've actually been listening to recently, Christ. (pronounced "krisst", short for "Christopher") has been a favourite. I believe he used to do stuff with Boards of Canada in their early days. It's a fairly similar sound, but different enough to keep me interested. Other than that, I've returned to Kicking a Dead Pig, which is a remix album for some of Mogwai's earlier stuff. I'm a bit of a Mogwai fan. Too high a percentage of my clothes is Mogwai merchandising. I think it might give a bad impression. And I've been really liking Stars of the Lid for a few months now. That's very slow music consisting of little other than extended tones. And Dälek, a lot of which is noise music with rapping over it. I'm not good at writing about music.

I don't think we can reach any fundamental truth here, unfortunately, as is so often the case. Yufster's position is consistent, and I think mine is as well. As far as I see it, "importance" is a fabrication. I'd say it was a human creation, but all conscious beings must assign some sort of degree of importance to the things around them in order to determine what to give priority. I would contend that the increased mental activity in certain animals means that there is more of the "stuff of life", if you will, going on. The main problem with Yufster's approach is that the edge cases become difficult to classify. Are bacteria alive? Does each cell of bacteria have the same importance as an animal? How about fungi? Or plants? For me, the deciding factor is consciousness, and it's my assumption that the level of consciousness of a beast is very roughly proportional to the size of its brain (allowing for a fair amount of variance, depending on the structure of the brain). It would probably be more accurate to judge it by the actual contents of the brain, but I'm no neuroscientist, so I can't really get into any of that. Also, I contend that animals would be just as cuntly as humans, given half the chance. I don't mean to do them down, but I'm not going to let misanthropy elevate the other animals, as though they're on the other side of a set of scales. We're just more capable of up-fuckery. Animals are, on the whole, just as opportunistic and selfish as us. Besides, humanity isn't all bad. After all, we invented podcasts. Podcasts are pretty awesome, right? I don't see any lions podcasting at each other. Or horses podcasting to tapirs, or whatever. Animals are rubbish.

I particularly like how their logo bounces in ball form out of their own logo, then unfurls, replacing the original, identical logo. That's got to have some sort of symbolic meaning. It's also delightfully meta.

Option 3: Being around it as a child gives one a strength of stomach unattainable for we pansy city folk. In all honesty, I expect most people can become at least partially accustomed to most things, but I also think that growing up with a firm grasp of the reality and matter-of-factness of death leaves one uniquely equipped for that sort of thing. I'm just guessing, of course.

That was the idea. I also considered "thewizard.biz", but it's not as snappy, unless it were something like "thewizard.biz/ard". I also like "thewiz.biz" because WIZZ IS PISS HAR HAR HAR. It works on many levels. I'd comment on the phrase "fairly hilarious", but I'm mildly dying of hunger, so I'm kind of distracted at the moment.

I thought it might be quite amusing to go for thewiz.biz, but it's taken. It looks like it might become available in March, but it also looks a bit expensive. Oh wait, apparently you have to be a business. I wonder if they actually check that stuff. The bastards. Also, whilst eightbit.co.ck is a possibility, eightbitcock.co.ck and its variants are probably not, as profanity is not allowed. .co.ck domains are expensive, though. I also contemplated jazzyslider.something, but that seemed a bit too much like laughing at my own joke, which I already do enough of. Ideally, though, it would add an actual jazzy slider which the user could adjust to alter the amount of jazz being injected into the website, in the form of soothing backing music. You know, with Flash or something. If one were really going to town, it could be applied to the podcast theme tune, morphing it from its original form to a much jazzier version. Hey, a man can dream, can't he?