Tag Archives: Blogs

Life Imitating Spam

I’m getting a huge influx of spam comments that are thankfully getting stopped by my impenetrable defences. This is one of a series that I keep getting:

Basically nothing seems worth thinking about. I haven?t been up to much these days. I just don?t have much to say right now. I can?t be bothered with anything, but whatever.

The spammer has apparently got the same case of ennui as me, brought on by the lack of any real gaming news, even with CES and Macworld going on. Still, I’ve got my order in for a Halo 3 beta key with the free copy of Crackdown, so there’s always that to look forward to.

Back To Uni

I started back at uni today which is an odd experience having been away for the best part of five months. Still, I don’t have to do shorthand this year because it’s an option. Thank God…

I had to laugh today when I had my first seminar in the online journalism unit. The guy is a former editor of a major Internet magazine and then told us that one of the most popular blogging platforms is ‘WorldPress’ (ahem) and that web development isn’t done much in raw HTML since the arrival of Dreamweaver. You know that old “those who can’t, teach” phrase? Yeah…

Hard to believe that I’m in my final year of university and in eight months or so I’ll be kicked out into the big wide world. With any luck then I’ll be able to give the ‘aspiring’ in the site header the boot, completing what I’ve been planning to do for over a decade. Yay for me.

Democracy In Action

This made me laugh. The nominations for the 24th annual Golden Joystick awards are open and us gamers can show how democratic we are by voting for our favourite games of the year. The esteemed UK Resistance (militant Sega fanboys who still resent Sony – see here and here – for murdering the Dreamcast, for those who aren’t in the know) are calling for everyone to vote for 50 Cent: Bulletproof so that the developers have to go and collect their award and get publicly humiliated on TV.

Naturally this will also lead to nobody making any more stupid urban “gangsta” games, so we all win. Do it now.

The Jason Mewes Story

I talked about Kevin Smith’s blog some time ago (here to be exact) but there’s something on there that begs to be read, especially if you’re a Jay and Silent Bob fan. Jason Mewes had a well-publicised battle with drug addiction that pretty much started with weed around the time that Clerks was made and ballooned into crack, heroin, Oxycontin, and whatever he could lay his hands on that almost killed him or landed him in jail several times.

With the third anniversary of his sobriety around this time, Kevin has been blogging the full history of their relationship (start with part one, here) and all the crap that Mewes put him through. Reading it, I honestly don’t know if I could give someone that many chances and pour that much money into helping them. The moment they stole from a dealer and ran into the house where my family lived they’d have been out the door.

It’s spread over nine very long parts, but definitely worth the time to read and thankfully it all works out in the end, complete with quite a tear-jerking video on the last entry. Without Mewes we wouldn’t have the great-looking Clerks 2 to look forward to, which is clearly going to be the monster hit of the summer. That or Snakes on a Plane

DS Lite Video Review

Not mine, unfortunately. That’s lost amongst the millions of Japanese and potential importers who are scrabbling to obtain what little stock is available, although I may be able to get one next week since Eynon and team are off to Japan again. This is a video review put together in two parts (the second is answering questions from the first one) and answers most of the concerns from people wondering how much better than the standard DS it is, so without further ado…

The bigger Mac geeks out there may have noticed that the videos were made by Cabel, co-founder of Panic, who are in turn makers of the best FTP program ever and one of the few pieces of shareware that I’ve bought. He’s a great host for the videos, with some classic lines explaining how the DS Lite can function as a death ray whilst also managing to call it “mildly retarded” and coming out with a great ending to it. I’ll be watching for more material from him in the future.

Kevin Smith

For anyone who’s interested in him and his work, Kevin Smith now has a blog. It’s not so much his musings; it’s more of a journal that intentionally goes into meticulous detail about everything that happens in every day of his life, achieving an interesting dichotomy of being prosaic enough to live up to the title but also making me wonder how anyone who goes on CNN, meets Zach Braff, and appears on The Tonight Show within the space of four days can consider their life boring.

He also uses WordPress. All the good ones do.