I don’t know what’s going on here, but this is essentially a crazy japanese version of the penguin/yeti game where you’re a girl on a bicycle assaulting some poor boyfriend or gaijin or I don’t know. Anyway just click the link and have fun.

Some things I’ve noticed:
- clicking the mouse lots (especially when thing like ‘AERIAL’ or ‘SPECIAL’ light up) gives you bonus boosts
- combos and “summons” are possible. Which is great.

My best score is shown above, though it would be much higher but I clicked “GO TO MENU”.

Today I watched The Matrix. It’s still a electric, thrilling, uniquely engrossing experience even after nigh-on 6 years - which is incredible considering how much it relies on pre-millennium zeitgeist, the inimitable tensions that arose between the end of the nineties and the start of the noughties and the specific cultural touchstones of that era. Or haven’t we moved on since? Is that the reason why it still feels so prescient?

I think it’s a rather scary thought, considering how entwined it is with 1999 - and how much has happened lately - to be so consistently affected by it now. ‘We’ still live our daily lives in cubicles, encroached upon by multi-nationals and world-terrorism - and of course there is the internet, something which has grown from a niche activity in ‘99 to the great unavoidable behemoth it is today. A computer in every room, a modem in every house, so the exterior forces are unavoidable: they are banner ads and popups and virii, and the working week is no longer confined to this cubicle. With the internet it has spread to offices and bedrooms around the world until there is no cubicle to be seen - the cubicle is all around us.

Or it’s just an incredibly well-made film. Your choice ;)

Some of this comes straight from IRC. It’s 3:40am and I’m speaking my mind. Blame Lemon Jelly, the last track on their immensely brilliant new album got me in the pondering mood.

The eternal quandry is this: I love musicians and their music, and yet I can’t afford to buy all of it. This is how capatalism works, which is fine. Either way, I don’t want to buy CDs which I’ll rip once and never use again - it’s a waste of money, it’s bad for the environment and if I owned all the music I am in possesion of (even at this moment) I’d need acres of storage space to stack all the bloody things. Peoplekind has moved on. Peoplekind has spoken: we don’t need bits of plastic, and plastic boxes with paper inlays. Music is digital, it exists in the ether, it can travel from New York to London to Tokyo in an eye’s blink. Compact Discs are defunct. Musical culture is truly global. This is brilliant.

So I figure I should be paying ~£5 for an album of mp3s. Think how much music publishers would save if they didn’t have to make CDs. I told you to think about it because I don’t know exactly how much they’d save, maybe you do. CDs are cheap to mass-produce, sure, but think of all the jobs they could do without, all the factories they could close, all the shipping charges and cuts given to retailers. All that stuff - gone. That’s a lot of money. They already sell mp3s, but they’re hideously overpriced. A true embracing of this new digital music culture means dumping the past, and ceasing to dump the overheads onto the consumers (or fans - you know, the people who keep them housed and fed) by way of ridiculous price hikes. In fact, with no need to mass produce and distribute CDs, who the hell needs a publisher anyway? That’s another issue.

If musicians followed this route entirely they’d still make a substantial amount of money - maybe not as much as they did before, or maybe (paradoxically perhaps) they’d make more (if the fat cats didn’t take a cut, or didn’t exist). Besides, whoever said that being a musician was about being rich. It’s not. I think that this digital music culture would also be beneficial in elminating bands who can’t cut it as legitimate artists - those ‘manufactured’ solely for the purposes of making money, which are entirely excrable. I have nothing against the quality of that type of music (which is not to say the quality in terms of musical standard, but the aural qualities that say whether it’s good to listen to) - but making music for money is shit, pure and simple (no pun intended, pop lovers).

That’s what I think, anyway. And now I shall get back to downloading The Beatles entire back catalogue.

Joke.

Blockland. If you’ve ever spent any amount of time playing with Lego, then you need this in your life. I’ve not had so much good honest fun online for a long time, it’s like a universal game everyone can join in with. Love it.

Word of wisdom: don’t go afk for too long. As illustrated above. Chortle.

Download the game here.

Film | The Wild Bunch (Dir: Sam Peckinpah, 1969)
“We watch endless violence to assure us that violence is not good”
– Judith Crist, 1976

“The Wild Bunch has been described as director Sam Peckinpah’s great ode to pacifism. In the first sequence of the film, composed mostly a series of short cuts and pans, we see the titular gang approaching a typical western townstead. As the camera freeze-frames on each particular member, including a collective wide shot, we are forcibly urged to side with these bandits. The camera focuses on a group of youngsters gathered in the hot, dirty road. In their midst, two golden scorpions struggle, overrun with stinging red ants. A strange kind of childlike malice.”

A look at Sam Peckinpah’s classic Western. [Article continues…]

The most observant amongst you will have noticed the addition of the ARTICLES link to the navbar above (kidding, it’s quite subtle - I should probably make it red or something).

Obviously this is a common blog feature, and it’s something I’ve been planning to add ever since I got this damn thing (back in 2002). Shocking, I know. But, er, ‘life finds a way’ (thanks Ian)… and now it’s completed (although not fully designed) I shall be uploading lots of words for your internet enjoyment.

First up is an article which I posted here a few days ago (or yesterday, so it seems), a GUIDE to getting Gmail working with MSN Messenger (w/ Plus), which I’ve updated with lots of pretty colors and other things.

Thanks! Now continue to read on, and download DARWINIA.

Help the Darwinians fight back the viral infestations.

It’s been ages since I checked up on this game - Introversion’s second masterpiece Darwinia. From playing the demo that’s what it feels like - a simple concept (help digital beings fight viruses) executed with considerable skill. Apart from being staggeringly gorgeous to look at (something, for all its brilliance, you could not say about Uplink) which is saying something in the current climate of technically brilliant graphics, it eats hours just as hungrily as their former release.

The gameplay is akin to the digital love-child of Syndicate Wars, Black and White and Tron…and Cannon Fodder. All of these influences are thrown into the Introversion melting pot, and out comes a game that totally eschews current videogame expectations. A stylised interface, sleek retro-fitted polygonal landscapes and sprites, something like an ambient music track… I have yet to work out if it is too easy or not - it’s a puzzling game that seems sometimes easy, then fiendish, then all of a sudden you’ve lost an evening. I already adore it.

Visit the site here to oggle the eye candy and download the demo.

Tonight I have: changed my email address.

Big deal, right? Right indeed. The trouble is, the digital world - love it or loathe it (chalk me up a ‘love’ there, buddy) - throws a shitfit every time you do something like this. When you change your email address, the thousand-and-one sites that you’ve subscribed to over the past 5 years want to know.

So, to rephrase, tonight I have:

- got round to embracing my gmail account as home.
- forwarded around 600 emails to my new account. By hand. In Hotmail.
- visited around 50 sites to tell that I’m upping sticks.
- sent 12 emails to customer service lines to ask them to change my email address, because their crappy web server can’t deal with that much action.
- got Gmail working with Messenger.

This last one is a beaut. This is why I’m posting. This is me providing a service!

edited 03/02/05: I have uploaded the full guide here, in the Articles section of this site.

Next week: shoemaking.