Best T-Shirt for the slogan, "Destined for Greatness but Pacing Myself." Brilliant!

Best Costume for "Where's Wally?" Found him!

Best 'Undiscovered' Band - The Hightown Crows for drive, energy and this superb minimalist drum kit:

Best Political Campaign to Joe Hayman for Let's Talk, Gordon Such a simple and clever idea.

Thanks too to Tim Rylands, Russell and Gill for their excellent company, delicious 'Oggies' and refreshing pints of the old 'Dark 'n' Knobbly'.

Looking forward to next year already.

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“… I’m stupidly pleased that Feign Death is back [in Unreal Tournament 3], having been absent in Unreal Tournament 2k3/4. Why? Storytime!

Back in around 1999, after eating some Hot Cross Buns diligently garnished with a brain-affecting plant extract that’s more commonly inhaled, my best friend and I hauled our PCs into the same room and rigged up a serial connection to play original UT deathmatch against each other. After half an hour of our chemically-altered reaction times not making for a particularly adrenaline-fuelled match, I thought it would be really, really funny to hit Feign Death. So I hit F, crumpled to the ground and lay there for what seemed like a couple of minutes, until my mate, slightly frustrated at not being able to find me, eventually ran over my ‘corpse’, at which point I unfeigned death and started spraying bullets at him, causing him to scream and really, actually fall off his chair.

We both laughed long and hard for some time, and then happened to glance at the clock. I realised that, as a result of the slight time distortion effect that can come with imbibing the substance in question, I’d in fact been feigning death for almost an hour. My equally addled friend had, during this time, become accustomed to being in an apparently empty map, and had in fact run past my prostrate avatar dozens of times already by that point – hence the screaming when it suddenly rose up and started shooting at him. We then also realised we’d been very loudly playing Meatloaf’s Bat out of Hell on repeat for the entire duration, and the neighbours really weren’t happy about it. Slightly embarrassed about it all, we went out for snacks, only to find that someone had for some reason crossed out the name of every sandwich in the shop and scribbled ‘Ewok’ onto the front of the packet instead. So we came home, ate Ewok sandwiches and played more UT until we both basically passed out at our keyboards.

My best friend passed away unexpectedly two years ago. That night of extreme confusion and Unreal Tournament is one of my fondest memories of him. And that’s why I’m glad Feign Death is back.”

JJ - the friend in question - and I grew up together as gamers. Both of us lacked the cash/parental goodwill to indulge in the Amigas and NESes everyone else seemd to have in the earlier years of secondary school, and so we tumbled into Spectrums and BBC Micros instead. We seemed backwards to our ever-mocking peers, but we were positively drowning in casette and floppy copies of games at a time when everyone else was stuck saving up for the latest Zelda. I didn't start writing about games until about 2001 (and writing well about games until about 2007), but playing Double Dragon and Chuckie Egg together (and there were far more games we each simply watched the other one play) was instrumental in bumping gaming into my premiere hobby.

We didn't go to the same university due to some half-thought-out teenage boy-man sense that we should each stand on our two feet, and I'll always regret that. The gaming continued nonetheless - both of us had PCs by that point, so would swap CD-Rs full of treats with each other whenever we met up. One of those was UT, and a visit to his student house one Summer the source of the above anecdote. Post-uni, JJ became a far worthier man than I - a teacher by trade, and an astonishingly proactive individual both socially and personally. Even his death reflected that - he collapsed in the gym, in training for a sponsored walk of the country's length. The coroner was never able to find a cast-iron cause, but believes he had an irregular heartbeat as a result of an earlier viral infection. I'm a little too close to saying something stupidly saccharine like "he died as he lived" there. Let's just say he lived a lot in only a quarter of a century. Me, I plonked myself in front of a monitor around 2001 and pretty much just stayed there. That's damaged me in a lot of ways, most recently playing a significant part in my breaking up with my girlfriend of seven years. I need to keep JJ in mind if I'm going to change my ways. He wasn't an intellectual inspiration to me in the way a number of my current friends are, but he's the only person I know/knew who gave me a strong sense of how I should treat life.

In the couple of years preceding that, he didn't do much gaming anymore - it was understandably secondary to these nobler pursuits. Not that long before he passed away, he expressed disappointment that I was still labouring away in games/tech journalism rather than moving onto something bigger. I was a little offended; there was enough about that career which I enjoyed to want to stay in it (this was before a couple of promotions pushed me too far into the managerial aspect of magazines, which is why I'm freelance these day), but I also knew I'd never be able to live up to his expectations. He was a better man than I, pure and simple. I also knew our shared gaming history was pretty much over, and that was a little sad.

That said, I'm pretty sure he'd have gotten a kick out of some of the stuff I'm writing about on RPS. The sort of wry, single-idea indie games that are so in vogue would have tickled him, and I like to think he'd have respected the more narrative pieces I occasionally wheel out. It may still have been about games, but at least I was writing, not simply reviewing. I wish he'd seen it, that I could have proven to him I wasn't going to spend my life going nowhere on a PC magazine.

Anyways. Flecked with nostaglic sorrow or not, that night of feigning death in UT pretty much sums up what I'm always looking for from games, and also the reason JJ was my best mate from age 9 to 26. Some day, I'll write it up properly - and somewhere that matters, not in a post about a demo.

Now all I need is about three hours a day to investigate it...

I decided to try my hand at Curious Bird's Color Week.  Here's to a green Monday:

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Courtesy of Holy Moly.

Here's what I learned in my most recent time wasted spent on Google:

• My maiden name yields someone who plays Lacrosse.
• My married name yields someone who plays field hockey.  (Sadly, I played neither)
• The only results from searching my married name that are actually me are related to my current job (blah, blah, blah, church, blah, blah).
• A couple of my former boyfriends are married.
• One of those has two super cute kids.
• One former boyfriend seems to be perpetually stuck at age 21.  (yikes)

Tracking down people with whom you have had little to no contact with for years is pretty surreal.  My mental images of some of these people are frozen in time, circa 1991.  To see photos of their families, read about their careers, creative and academic pursuits is almost jarring.  Frankly, it is a bit jarring to think of myself circa 1991.

One thing is for sure, I like now a lot better than 1991.  (Especially now that the other 4 members of the household have stopped vomiting.)

Modest Mouse - Good News For People who Love Bad News
Bloc Party - Silent Alarm
Supergrass - Life on Other Planets
Wolf Parade - Apologies to the Queen Mary
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - s/t
The Flaming Lips - At War with the Mystics
Tapes 'n' Tapes - The Loon
Modest Mouse - We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank
CYHSY - Some Loud Thunder

Disc Two:

Beck - Guero
Bloc Party - A Weekend in the City
Franz Ferdinand - You Could Have it so Much Better
Grandaddy - The Sophtware Slump
Clinic - Internal Wrangler
The Beta Band - Heroes to Zeroes
CYHSY - Some Loud Thunder (oops)
Gnarls Barkley - St. Elsewhere
Neutral Milk Hotel - In the Aeroplane over the Sea
Iron Horse - Pickin' on Modest Mouse - A Bluegrass Tribute

Disc Three:

Arctic Monkeys - Your Favourite Worst Nightmare
Daft Punk - Alive
The Fratellis - Costello Music
Gorillaz - s/t
Hot Chip - The Warning
Kula Shaker - Summer Sun E.P.
Peter Bjorn & John - Writer's Block
Pinback - Autumn of the Seraphs
Vampire Weekend - s/t

 Disc Four:

Daft Punk - Human After All
Gorillaz - Demon Days
Hot Chip - Made in the Dark
LCD Soundsystem - Sound of Silver
Muse - Black Holes and Revelations
Richard Cheese - Aperitif for Destruction
Supergrass - Road to Rouen
The Dandy Warhols - Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia
The La's - The La's
The Shins - Chutes Too Narrow
The White Stripes - White Blood Cells

Disc Five:

Crystal Castles - Crystal Castles
Hot Chip - Coming On Strong
Gnarls Barkley - The Odd Couple
Hives - The Black and White Album
Queens of the Stone Age - Era Vulgaris
Spoon - Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
Stereolab - Sound-Dust
The Clash - London Calling

DISC 666 ALL DEATH METAL EDITION:

Air - Pocket Symphony
Badly Drawn Boy - The Hour of Bewilderbeast
Death Cab for Cutie - Transatlanticism
Kula Shaker - Strangefolk
Pinback - Summer in Abaddon
Sigur Ros - (the one from 2008)
Sufjan Stevens - The Avalanche
Wilco - A Ghost is Born

Disc Seven:

Clinic - Do It
Daft Punk - Discovery
Flying Lotus - Los Angeles
Handsome Furs - Plague Park
MGMT - Oracular Spectacular
Pinback - The is a Pinback CD
Sonic Youth - Daydream Nation
Supergrass - Diamond Hoo Ha
The Shins - Oh, Inverted World
Wolf Parade - At Mount Zoomer

more to come...

and Robert Goulet:

:)

EB reaction #1: "Where does that leave me?"

EB reaction #2: "You should blog that."

LONDON—Twins who were separated at birth got married without realizing they were brother and sister, a lawmaker said, urging more information be provided on birth certificates for adopted children.

A court annulled the British couple's union after they discovered their true relationship, Lord David Alton said. . . .

"I was recently involved in a conversation with a High Court judge who was telling me of a case he had dealt with," Alton said according to a transcript of the Dec. 10 debate. "It involved the normal birth of twins who were separated at birth and adopted by separate parents.

"They were never told that they were twins. They met later in life and felt an inevitable attraction, and the judge had to deal with the consequences of the marriage that they entered into and all the issues of their separation."

I'm always intrigued by the bond between twins.  More than that, though, I just can't get over the title.  First I read it as "twits" instead of "twins," which then of course made me think of the Upper Class Twit of the Year competition; then there's the fact that as it's structured there, it sounds like the twins meant to get married, they just didn't mean to get married in Britain.

Then, from the Globe itself: No Pants (on the T) 2K8!

Knobby knees. Hairy legs. You can see plenty on the beach in summer. You may also see them on the subway in Boston tomorrow.

Some riders may be participating then in No Pants 2K8, an event in which some people plan to ride the trains in their underwear.

Organizer Adam Sablich said that it's a "large-scale improv event," and that 400 to 500 people have said via Internet networking sites that they are interested in participating. He said it is a spinoff of an event that has been happening in New York City for a half-dozen years.

The New York events have been organized by Improv Everywhere, a group whose website says its pranks are intended to "bring excitement to otherwise unexciting locales."

"We're out to prove that a prank doesn't have to involve humiliation or embarrassment; it can simply be about making someone laugh, smile, or stop to notice the world around them," reads the website, improveverywhere.com.

Sablich, 25, of Haverhill, said the event calls for nothing illegal and that participants may wear coats over their boxer shorts or briefs.

I wish I were still in town so I could participate. :)

[I'm trying to get back into the swing of blogging after nearly a week of feeling pretty wretched.  So, if anyone has anything they'd like to see me write about or has read any stories/blogs/etc. they think I'd be interested in, please feel free to leave me a note in the comments thread here!]

What I've read.
I'm reading Shantaram at the moment - recommended to me by Darren who runs our Shanghai office and is Australian, while walking past a Delhi shanty town at night (the significance of which will be lost on you unless you've read it).  It's fantastic, beautifully written and an amazing story.  I can't put it down - which makes typing a chore, frankly.  I also read Alex James's autobiography which was just wonderful.  The man is a national treasure.  Am also reading a book about Winston Churchill's witicisms.  Very fine.

What I've watched.
Sweet Fanny Adams on TV, to be honest.  The Christmas special of Extras was on while I was cooking and the little of it I did see was very good (the George Michael monologue tickled me in particular "It was bloody Stewart Copeland's skip - before we knew it the Police had turned up...").  Some football (top of the league, ithangyo).  That was about it though.  Chitty Chitty Bang Bang enthralled the kids.  Cars too.  Away from TV, I've been mucking about with the BBC iPlayer - although seven hours to download The Best of Top Gear last night was a little steep, I thought.  Oh and I can highly recommend Ratatouille at the cinema - the best Disney film for years.

What I've listened to.
Again, very little.  As a whole 2007 was a bad, bad year for music.  December just awful.  High School Musical 2 was on most in our house, which tells you all you need to know.  The first Harry Potter book, read by the excellent Mr Fry, accompanied the family on our drive down and then back up France.  On the eve of my birthday I tried listening to The (eponymous) Stone Roses and, as my Twitter followers will have discovered, didn't enjoy it - for the first time evah.  A sad, sad day.   The beloved bought me a portable DAB for said birthday, but I can't get no reception (no, no, no) at home and it doesn't work on the train, so it's going back.  Shame.  I really must listen to more music in 2008.  In fact, I think I'll review an album a week here - there, I've said it in front of both of you, so I'll have to do it now.  Quick caveat, for the bank manager: the albums may not necessarily be new ones.

Where I've surfed.
I hugely enjoyed not opening my laptop for almost two weeks over Chrimbo.  I've realised I don't really surf anymore - in fact, I appear to have disappeared up my own RSS.  Which may or may not be a good thing.  However, I dearly hope that someone somewhere works out how to better aggregate the news I want to read and presents it to me in a more convenient format than is currently the case.  By the way, I seem to 'surf' more on my mobile than on my PC.  The mobile internet is becoming almost bearable, and is, as any fule kno, the future of everything.

Merry new year.

"You know," EB said, "I think it's a good thing that you're an optimist and I'm a pessimist.  I'm like, 'Oh great, the world is ending,' and you're like" -- at this point he smiled, raised his eyebrows, and held out his hands as if presenting an offering -- "'Cheeseburger?'"

Sounds about right.  :)

Happy Lizzie is happy.  :)

Open thread: what's on your mind?

(And in case anyone's curious, we got power back yesterday.  More on that sometime this weekend.)

"Okay, I've got a new game we can play," Evil Bender said. "The goal is to name people or things that are better than Ronald Reagan. For example: this highway [a Ronald Reagan Memorial highway, which is, I think, what sparked the idea] is better than Ronald Reagan."

"Indeed," I responded, then paused. "That bush is better than Ronald Reagan," I said, pointing out a shrub on the side of the road.

"But I can think of a Bush who isn't."

"Hi-o!"

So, that's how much of the trip went: we'd notice something, anything, and state that it was better than Ronald Reagan.

"Rice Krispie Treats are better than Ronald Reagan," I said, my mouth full of marshmallowy goodness.

"That cow is better than Ronald Reagan," Evil Bender said, gesturing toward a lone cow in a field.

And so on. You'd be surprised -- or maybe you wouldn't be -- how well we entertained ourselves with such a simple concept. And there were so many possible variations!

"What a jackass!" one of us would exclaim after an act of asshaberdashery such as tailgating then passing us on the right when we were in the middle lane on a three-lane highway.

"And yet he's still better than Ronald Reagan."

"Fundies are definitely not better than Ronald Reagan," we would say after passing a Right to Life billboard.

It may well have been the best road trip game I've ever played.

Here's why I thought of the above video, aside from the fact that it never fails to amuse me: Saturday night Evil Bender and I headed out to Kansas City to see No Country for Old Men (we're fans of the Coen brothers, and it wasn't showing here, or even in Lawrence). As we were driving back we passed a billboard for some sort of AM radio commentator, and the most prominent phrase on it was the quote/title/wev "Act Your Wage."

"'Act Your Wage'?" I said. "What the hell does that even mean? I'm unemployed; what does that say about how I'm supposed to act?"

"Indeed," Evil Bender replied, "but did you see the American flag up there? I'm betting he's one of the wingnuttiest of wingnuts." He then proceeded to tune the station in. On it a man with a British accent was giving some statistics about how many women own vibrators, and went on to say that the numbers suggested that many women might even own TWO vibrators!

I expected him to go on to say that such things are damaging marriage in America or some such fundy nonsense. Instead, we soon discovered we had found the motherlode of craziness: he explained that it wouldn't be long before women were turning to robots -- yes, robots -- to satisfy their needs. That way they'd be able to get all the pleasure they currently get from their vibrators, but it would be able to hold them and whisper "I love you, my darling" into their ears. (I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried, folks.) He went on, and on, and then it turned out he was a guest on a show, and the host asked him clarifying questions, and I got the impression -- even as I was, by that point, laughing so hard my eyes were watering -- that a big part of why the host was taking him so seriously was his accent, because we all know that everything sounds smarter if you say it with a British accent.

So, for all you ladies out there who feel like your vibrators just aren't doting on you the way you'd like them to, fear not! The necessary technology may well be available sooner than any of us dared hope.

(WARNING: Persons denying the existence of Robots may be Robots themselves.)