A Note For Potential Insurers.

I'm tired of photoshopping Mowbli onto things. Here's a new game. Anyone who feels desperately compelled to sell me insurance, just all of you get together in a big circle around me. I will have a machete. Anyone with enough fingers left to type up my details at the end of five minutes can sell me insurance.



And the very best of luck to you all.

What It Says On The Tin.

Zombie dating. Yup.

Zompocalypse: The Comic!

If you use Stumbleupon, never, but never add 'comics' as something you want to browse. You get sites about actual comics, but you also get the absolute worst hack webcomic shite.

It doesn't matter if you can't draw, just stack two circles on top of one another in MS Paint and away you go! People will think it's charming and homemade! You definitely don't need jokes, only those bullshit hacks who make money money from their comics bother about shit like structure and punchlines.

Here's my guide to making a webcomic:

That Meaty Harvest.

For some time now I've been promising everyone who reads this thing that whatever floated to the top of my spam filter would once again be pressed up against your screen like so much face at the window.

Without further ado then, some moist, if not entirely fresh, spammy treats for y'all:

Don't get lost in her eyes because of small dimensions.

Or impossible geometries, presumably.

Tell them about the honey

You must. It is fucking imperative.

Have wild nights of love back again to life.

Despite appearances, the message was not selling sex zombies.

We have everything to cure your masculinity.

Good. It was beginning to itch.

Unemployed To Be Used For Soup

If you vote for Cameron.

Be ready go come anytime

That's why we had the flap installed in the kitchen door.

All the women will be in awe when your manhood shines like a star

What? I mean, what in the name of Jesus Trevor Christ?

Do you want to be King of sweet babies?

Categorically no.

And finally, not a tagline, but I did receive a message from a man by the name of... Kenny Jesus. And I'm glad I did.

Please, Stop Calling.

Common Sense?

At The Cair-funn Whare-huss.

I have been phoned perpetually by representatives of Carphone Warehouse, all wanting me to extend the free insurance policy I didn't sign up for. This has been going on for nearly a week, despite each and every one of them swearing blind that it would not happen again, in any of the up to five times a day I have been contacted, and it's starting to bother me.

Yarrp.

You're not getting an explanation. Or an apology.

Le Retour.

I'm back.



Aren't you glad?

Enjoy.

Speakers on full, if you please.



My work here is done.

That's that.

So then, The Apocalypse. I hope you didn't have any plans, because apparently Israel is ready to leap into action if it 'feels threatened'.

Just let that sink in.

We're fucked. When they feel threatened? It's Israel. They always feel threatened. It has a lot to do with the threats. Who would have thought putting 7 million Jews in the Middle East would lead to shenanigans? Really, you just couldn't see it coming.

In The Details.

From George Bush's July 4th speech:

“Thomas Jefferson understood that these rights do not belong to Americans alone. They belong to all mankind. And he looked to the day when all people could secure them. On the 50th anniversary of America’s independence, Thomas Jefferson passed away. But before leaving this world, he explained that the principles of the Declaration of Independence were universal. In one of the final letters of his life, he wrote, ‘May it be to the world, what I believe it will be — to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all — the Signal of arousing men to burst the chains, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government.’”

And what Jefferson actually said:

“May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government.”

Spot the difference?

Did You Know Your Brain Does Nothing?

Ok, here's something I hadn't heard of before. Non-Materialist Neuroscience.

I need to find some books on the topic, because this is Ding-dong, zipp-eh-dee-doodah crazy. Good times.

What's The Conservative Take On Special Sauce?

Last one. Promise.

Note the level of detail, and attempts to simplify and codify. Magnifique!

Occasionally Abandoned In Vague Murk

Alone In The Dark is the most frustrating game I've ever enjoyed. It's packed full of really good ideas, is pretty damn atmospheric (until someone speaks), and generally shows more ambition than almost anything in the last two years. Unfortunately, it's about a year away from being finished.

First up, the title is just plain wrong. Point one: You are rarely alone. Point two: It is rarely dark. Even putting the darkness settings way down to 'emo bedroom', it is still pretty well illuminated for the most part, and you have a full and luxuriant view of the horrible monster chewing your face off.

The plot and voice acting are absolutely atrocious. The writers seem to have confused swearing with mature and well-written dialogue. All the characters swear constantly. It's like it's been writeen by a bunch of 15-year-old boys (as opposed to most videogames, which are written for that demographic). It's genuinely painful. It's particularly galling because there are moments of brilliance in the presentation, particularly the graphics and score.

The plot then. The main character has amnesia. Duhn duhn duhhh!

What dark secrets will be uncovered? I am fucking gripped from the onset by this original and bold premise! I realise that, as a group, videogame characters suffer more head injuries than the average person, but this doesn't justify the prevelance of this default crutch for bad writers. Suffice it to say, it's a very clumsy attempt to bring the character from the original, 1920's set games into the present day. Precisely who this panders too, I am not sure, because fans of the original games released nearly 20 years ago are not that desperate to see the character returned. Most people playing games back then, and bearing in mind that these titles were niche even then, who is being targeted for this?

Anyway, the rest of the plot. Basically, Lucifer has decided he's going to come back to Earth. Unfortunately for him, your character is some sort of immortal ghostbusting MacGyver. The whole game involves improvising weapons and puzzle solutions from whatever you can find lying around. Again, unfortunately for Lucifer, he seems to have come back on prom night, meaning the streets are scattered with cars just loaded full of booze and duct tape.

The bugs are incredible. Given that the physics engine in this game is one that has been the industry standard for about five years now, to break it this badly requires a serious commitment to dodgy coding. Minutes before sitting down to write this, I watched as a hot dog cart started to mysteriously, and with no external force, roll towards me. Then it exploded. At one point, all the objects within 15 feet or so of my character started very slowly to float upwards. There has been nothing quite as funny as Boiling Point, in which the developers once proudly announced they'd fixed the bug that made all the leopards in the game float at treetop height, but it's pretty daft nonetheless.

It's barely possible to control the character a lot of the time, and yet the combat almost redeems the game. The idea that you can combine most of the items into the games into impromptu weapons means you're always scrabbling for something to use to defend yourself - and it really sets the game apart from anything else on the market. The fact that you can just set nearby detritus on fire to ward of enemies means that there are a genuinely huge number of emergent tactics available to you, and the enemy AI almost copes with whatever you do.

It's not enough to rescue the game, and it's sad to think of what it could have been, but it's interesting and certainly not dreadful. I did get it for free though.

Bloor? Or Ooasis?

From generic Rock'N'Roll nihilism to "Hey you kids, with your drugs."

10 Years. That's all it took.

A Radical Leftist Perspective.

I'm in a spiteful mood, and so pointing out the manifest flaws in others is just what I need to balm my wearied soul. So then, to Conservapedia, where wonders are ours to be had.

It was Ben Goldacre that reminded me of the fun to be had with Conservapedia, in posting this link. Please, please read it in full, because it's the funniest thing you'll read all year.

It's either incredibly brave of them to post the dialogue in full, or Andy Schafly genuinely doesn't understand just how badly he's been taken apart here. He also clearly doesn't understand what citation is, and has confused cited data for arrogance. In his second letter he again asks for data that is publicly available to be made available to him. If I ever get rich, the first thing I do after getting a big TV is to pay a guy to follow Andy Schafly around with a swanee whistle.

Shall we go with a little bit of pseudoscience first? This is a good one. I like this. It's a wonderful example of the fingers-in-the-ears "La la la, I'm not listening" approach so vital to 'creation science'. Make shit up, don't give a reason.

A little further leftfield, have some dinosaurs. Everyone loves dinosaurs, right? Everyone including Adam and Eve, it would seem, as dinosaurs lived in harmony with man and other animals in the garden of Eden. And of course, talk of dinosaurs leads to talk of that other children's favourite, dragons. Despite being cited (oh, the irony) in support of the 'dinosaurs done lived wit humanz and shared their sandwiches' hypothesis', they're referred to as mythical here. Funny that. So dragons were dinosaurs, and so were unicorns. Settled? Good. Moving on.


The only thing that would make dinosaurs more awesome than being dragons and unicorns

How about my old friend Jack Thompson? The Conservapedia article on him is rather brief, despite his being a very vocal proponent of conservative values. Wikipedia is a little more detailed. Amazing that a positive spin on Jack should be significantly shorter than a thorough take on his behaviour.

Of fuck it. I'll just through a few more insane links at you and we can be done here. This one is lovely. I've noticed that so much gun crime here. It's everywhere! And of course, I wholly buy into the idea that a deactivated gun cannot be reactivated. After all, it's pretty fucking hard to make or buy a firing pin.

Here's a page that ponders what to do about witchcraft. Here's a lovely essay. And here's the death of irony.

Gah. Enough. I can't wade through this shit any longer. So, in the spirit of cooperation that should apparently be outside of my egocentric leftist ways, what's your favourite page? Links below, if you please.

Prevenge.

Well, that's it. We're fucked.

"Would You Like To See My Nightgaunts?"

From a park in Russia, by all accounts:



Not as good as this though:



Our dark lord form beyond all time and space spends a lot more time lurking in the bushes than previously thought.

Meet Bob.

In one of the most fantastic pieces of shrill idiocy yet displayed in politics (it's an election year, no-one's short of examples), Senator Gayle Slossberg wants GTA IV legislated against because it contains a rape scene.

Problem is, it doesn't. She made it up. And everyone knows it. Doesn't stop her though. She says the only reason she can't confirm it's existence is that she's not good enough at the game to reach it.

This is a classic case of what I like to refer to as 'Bob The Magic Goblin' syndrome. If you are going to say something is true because it cannot be disproved, check first that your argument doesn't dissolve into undignified slop when it's subject is replaced by the words 'Bob The Magic Goblin'. Just becauase no-one has any evidence of it's existence doesn't mean it's not there of course. We're likely to come across new fundamental particles in the next few years. But if you have no evidence whatsoever, making bold claims, be it on the street or in the US senate is a bad idea.

Bob The Magic Goblin. Effective against 99% of known media scares, new age cures and deities.