Nevsky

The Moomins're awesome. And Tove Jansson is a pretty sweet writer (her novels/prose books are getting very slowly published in English at the moment, one came out this year, The True Deceiver / Den ärliga bedragaren). I've met a lot of people a handful of years older than me, who grew up with the Polish-German stop motion series of The Moomins. I think we all lucked out with the 90s Japanese version, to be fair. Moomins! Oh, for Christmas I got an umbrella, a PS3 controller and a few books 'n things. Including The Push Man and Other Stories by Yoshihiro Tatsumi, which is great and depressing.

Happy Birthday, Patters and Miffy!

Glad it was awesome. I had some sort of horrible day bug yesterday, so I was in bed by 9.

What is strange, is that Green Day have somehow been perpetually kept in place as the mainstream's go-to alternative, pop-ish punk band for 13 years now! I think they've made some good songs over the years, and Dookie is a good, peppy album. But wow. UK-based teen-alt magazine Kerrang! ran a fan-sourced toplist of best albums of the decade earlier this year. Green Day had 2 in the top 20 - American Idiot and 21st Century Breakdown. Bonkers. And, yes, more Batman would be very nice, if done well.

Same here. Hm.

I really like this game. I think it looks and sounds utterly charming, and it's an engrossing, smooth experience that is fun and brainteasing without being any less laidback. However, the last boss is pissing me off, and imposing artificial gates on the player that only open when a certain number of items are collected goes against the welcoming, engrossing nature of the thing.

So it's not just me!

So many glitches in that race. The main one being when Patters and I went to jack the same car, only for it to disappear in our hands.

Yeah, sorry about the strong response. Knowledge is power, I agree. Over the weekend, I watched: The Terminator - A surprisingly dated display of brilliance from James Cameron. Aliens - A surprisingly undated display of briliance from James Cameron. Paper Heart - Interesting, heartwarming, charming fudge-up of fact and fiction. Manhattan Murder Mystery - One of my favourite Woody Allen films, great to see him sinking his teeth into a plot-heavy genre flick for a change. Lots of humour and good character moments too. Cassandra's Dream - Almost the opposite of above. Some flashes of inspiration, but mostly a bit too dry, turgid and dull. Has to be expected, though, Allen does still make a film a year.

Should be free for this. Girlfriend leaves this afternoon, and then lecture at 6, will no doubt be back in good time.

Woo!

Yeah, that's quite jarringly pedantic. Language has a way of streamlining, adopting and shifting for its best interest - taking the names of brands, software, applications, etc. and extrapolating them for ease and understanding. While that may have relatively negative consequences such as Googling, Photoshopping, 'playing Nintendo', or whatever, I'd say that 'auto-tuning' is fair enough for common, casual usage. Certainly more pithy than 'used-a-pitch-correction-plug-in-on-vocal-track' - which is a notion I expressed in one word, used in context.

Here are a bunch of my games of the year: Shadow Complex Uncharted 2 Grant Thumb Auto Trine Flower Canabalt Today I Die It does embarrass me slightly to say that Arkham Asylum will probably be my pick for *the* game of the year. Sadly predictable. But it was so polished, and it pushed all the right buttons for me. And it was only the last boss battle that irked me as I was playing it. Note: still not completed Machinarium, Lost Winds: Winter of the Melodias, New Super Mario Bros. Wii. Not played Assassin's Creed II, Dragon Age, Zelda: Spirit Tracks, Professor Layton 2 etc.

I really liked that one, too! I've seen a few films over the last week or two. - A Serious Man is one of my favourite films from this year. - I didn't get on well with the adaptation of JM Coetzee's Disgrace at all. - I finally saw (500) Days of Summer, and it incensed me. I'd even say it offended me on one level. A couple of potentially saving graces, though. I won't go into it; this is a Recommendations thread, after all. So: Ponyo! I finally saw this last weekend, and I think it's a good one. Probably the most obviously flawed Ghibli movie. But when it works, it's a real delight. As everyone has had time to point out, it's very similar to My Neighbour Totoro. I thought the dub was good enough, although Liam Neeson was pretty weak. Probably offset by Tina Fey being great, though. And even though the voice actors don't attract attention to themselves in the film, the promotional campaign has definitely made much of 'Cate Blanchett, Matt Damon, Lily Tomlin' etc, so when they finally do come up, it's potentially distracting. The two 'Disney owns your soul' kids weren't bad, but a little annoying. Especially with .I saw it with a cinema screen full of kids (at least 70/30), and they seemed to enjoy it immensely. Which can be nothing but A Good Thing. I guess I'll get to see a subtitled screening with a load of middle aged film critics in a month or two.

Like Miffy, I'd recommend some instrumental jazz. I've pumped a lot of mileage out of two great, relatively recent live albums - Charles Mingus at Cornell 1964, and Thelonius Monk w/John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall. They're damn good. If they're too intrusive (Mingus gets a bit frantic at times), I'd recommend Miles Davis' On the Corner, or something super-chilled, like Coltrane's Blue Train. I practically wrote my whole dissertation while listening to Davis' mid-70s 'shaman period' albums. Heady stuff. I suppose it depends if you want driving work music, or ambient work music. I usually go for more driving stuff - some rhythmical classical music is good too. Stravinsky's Petrushka is great, or I usually queue up a comp I have of Shostakovich and Schnittke's Quintets for Piano and Strings. When it comes to reading, I often go quite ambient. I must have listened to Kraftwerk's Ralf und Florian album a million times for this reason. Horses for courses, really. I had a friend who listened to Dragonforce at full volume, because the mad-dash pacing made him type essays at shred-speed. And he revised for his final exams to Israeli PsyTrance.

Yeah, I got my copy three weeks ago, and it's definitely worth a look. I agree with Thunderpeel - it has some interesting articles. And the covermount CD isn't bad, either!

I think I mentioned, but my girlfriend is visiting from tomorrow, so with that, a lecture, and a post-lecture presentation, I doubt I'll be able to make it. Hope it's fun! And hope that potential-podcast chat goes well, too. I'd love to contribute, but I barely speak in GTA, so I doubt I'd be a good podcast 'dude'.

What...!? Unfortunate.

Left 4 Dead 2 for 360 seems to be on sale from Tesco for £15. I might actually get this.

We played it straight.

Nice stuff, Wrestle! I don't think I've ever contributed to this thread before. I have no confidence with recommending/talking about music any more. Long story. Anyway, here's some hyper-smooth, melodic exotica. Damn. I bloody love it when John Zorn whips out the comfort-music. qOr-RUc5FoI Zorn usually puts out at least 3 or 4 albums a year, and has consistently impressed me since I first came across his music 4-5 years ago. Evocative soundtracks, avant-garde classical, free-wheeling Jazz (both electric and acoustic), Klezmer... Doom-grind-jazz-metal. The guy's prolific and varied. And they have shedloads of his stuff on Spotify! Erm, otherwise. I've been navel-gazing like a 15 year old thanks to Tegan and Sara's new album Sainthood, and The xx's self-titled debut. It's fun to be glum!

My skills are getting worse by the week. This was fun, though. Miffy swims to the beach. A lone man strolls in the distance...

Lecture, than a screening of something... I can't remember what. Either way, I'll be back later than usual, and have no problem with there being Gay Tony. And next week my girlfriend is visiting, so I'll make her sit in silence as I stare at the screen and shout 'Shakespeeaaarree!' every now and then.

Are there any examples of animated films that are up to your standards?

That's very weird. My girlfriend saw the subbed version in Turku a good few weeks ago, and that was playing alongside the Finndub, if I recall correctly. I'm getting to see an advance screening of this on Sunday, which makes me very excited. Although, it will most likely be the Disney Dub, so I'm cautious. Wow, "uncreative, unchallenging, and intensely predictable... hardly seeing any merit"? You've set yourself up in a water-tight cocoon of antagonism, there, and that's not to quote from the spoiler-bit. I just tried to write up my own (conflicted, not-raving, still impressed by the subtleties) take on the film, but, well, maybe later.