Just in case you happen to be an editor from a prestigious magazine who wants to pay me lots of money, you can now find my resume in the About section of the site.

I had my second visit of my course to the Crown Court today and apart from being more interesting than last time it only reaffirmed my conviction never to work on a provincial newspaper (tomorrow I have a visit to the local newspaper, so we’ll see what I think about it then). I’ve spent about six hours total in court and I’ve yet to see a verdict delivered, and they never seem to get anything done. The entire thing just seems grossly inefficient; a place for ostentatious people with cauliflowers on their heads to go and argue semantics. I thought the justice system was supposed to be accessible to the normal person?

The other day I posted that Microsoft had sent me a replacement power cable with a European plug which was pretty useless to me. I phoned them up, they shipped out a new one, and I thought nothing more of it.

Well, today my replacement for the replacement arrived and…it was another European one. I’m not even going to bother ordering another one – I’ve diced with death for three years with the old one so I’ll just risk it and take the payout from Microsoft if my house burns down.

With so much baiting of the games industry going on in the media it’s always nice to see someone impartial reporting something positive about it, especially when it seems to contradict the old “gaming makes you violent” maxim by giving games an application where they’re going to help people. If sick children aren’t going to get people on our side I don’t know what will. Maybe games helping sick baby animals?

What would be even nicer would be to see the likes of the Daily Mail reporting on it, but apparently that sort of story doesn’t sell as many papers as some sensationalist bullshit about how Manhunt has you playing as someone who kills for sexual pleasure (it doesn’t, in case you couldn’t guess).

Thank goodness for the BBC; it’s good to know that they’re going to be around for at least ten more years.

I was listening to Colin and Edith on Radio 1 earlier today and tuned in in time to hear Colin talking about best games of last year after the BAFTA Game Awards. Someone on the text messages wrote in to say that FIFA should have won something, to which Colin burst into laughter and said: “There’s no accounting for taste.”

Good work. That’s proper use of the licence fee if I ever saw it.

As if you needed any proof that I’m always at the forefront of the gaming scene there’s a new review of Sega’s Dreamcast classic, Shenmue, here (as always, you can find it on the reviews page at any time). I’m occasionally going to review one of my old favourites just so I can wallow in nostalgia, so I hope that when I do it you enjoy reading about it as much as I enjoyed going back and playing them again.

I’ve never really had a good digital camera and I want one to take to Japan in September, so I’ve dropped the cash for the Panasonic DMC-FX2. A friend of mine bought the DMC-FX7 (reviewed here) which is the same thing but with a 5MP CCD instead of 4MP and a 2.5″ screen instead of 2″. I got the FX2 and a 1GB SD card for about £200 in total and the camera should arrive tomorrow, so I’ll probably post some feedback then.

Last night Channel 4 showed the latest of their ‘100 Greatest’ series, unsurprisingly fronted by Jimmy Carr, the 100 Greatest Cartoons. It should perhaps have been titled something more akin to the 100 Greatest Animations since it’s debatable whether 3D animation and more mature animation like Akira and Fritz The Cat (using “mature” in the loosest possible sense of the word in that case), but the results were interesting.

The Simpsons was an obvious choice for number one and I don’t think anyone expected anything else to win, but I really didn’t expect the public to vote the likes of Family Guy, Spirited Away, The Iron Giant, Akira, Ren & Stimpy, and Princess Mononoke to get such relatively high positions. Shrek didn’t deserve its high placing (watch it in ten years and see how badly it’s dated thanks to the overdone pop culture references) and I’d question whether The Incredibles would place so high if it wasn’t fresh in the mind, but I was definitely impressed with how we represented our taste in animation. Tally ho!