There’s a cat that lives near me who likes to follow passers-by, I call it the “following cat”. I thought about giving it food so that it would come and live at my house, but I think I prefer my new, low-maintenance, wooden lizard pet. I have imaginatively named him Godzilla.
Bonus picture for sbemail viewers: Piemonade. Warning: that link contains both food and drink, so isn’t suitable for people that don’t care.
Remember the start of Trainspotting where Renton does the “choose life” monologue? Back in ‘96 I thought it was just a bunch of made-up activities that only applied to EastEnders characters. I realise now that it was actually a checklist of things I would be doing over the next ten years. Most items are ticked off, just in time for my twenty-seventh birthday later this week.
But enough of that, Rez is coming up on Xbox Live Arcade. While I have played it to death on the PS2 already, I fancy getting it again for the achievement points and proving to the world that I can get the ultimate butterfly ending.
Until then, I’ll consider a third run through Rapture in the fantastic videogaming experience that is Bioshock. It should have been tougher though, gets far too easy about halfway through, even on hard.
PS. This just in – if you’re using the Compare People app on Facebook you definitely want to read this. Or just remove the evil being from your applications. Privacy violations are bad mmkay.
I return from Hungary, where I saw sights such as this almighty beast:
The rest of the pictures are on Flickr if you’re interested. Though, like most holiday photos, you probably had to be there. I’m quite impressed by Flickr, very quick and easy to use especially with the uploadr application.
That’s it for the update, I’m going to resume playing the lovely BioShock.
In the name of content diversity, it’s film review time!
Die Hard 4.0
Exactly what you would expect from a Die Hard movie. A good action flick carried excellently by Mr Willis. 6/10
A Michael Bay Film
As a standalone entity Transformers is top entertainment with action, humour, big robots and Megan Fox. If you loved Transformers as a child it might make you cry, but like whatever. 8/10
The Simpsons Movie
All those expensive script writers and this is the best storyline they could come up with? A Simpsons episode spread over ninety minutes makes for an average film, something The Simpsons Movie should never have been. 5/10
The Fountain
It’s an art film, the story makes little sense. Knowing that will save you re-watching it to see if you missed something. A compelling audiovisual experience nonetheless. 7/10
Brick
Even though the plot is explained at the end, I still couldn’t follow it. Very stylish, more than enough to compensate for the confusion. 9/10
Harsh Times
A buddy film that is mostly about Christian Bale flipping out and becoming increasingly mental. Watch this and call people “dawg” and “dude” for days. 7/10
That’s all folks. What have you seen recently, what did you think?
Trial run for August 2007 diet.
Aside from binging on bourbons, I used my lunch break to look up the ending for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows to see who dies. Turns out knowing what actually happens is less exciting than being curious about what might happen.
Shop of the week goes to Farmfoods in Norwich, partly for the offer on Bakin’ Boys flapjacks but mainly for the member of staff who has based his service style on Clerks. It’s like being served in Lidl but with the nonchalance raised to an art form.
There is a saying that everyone has a book in them, I wish I knew what mine was so I could start writing it. As much as I want to combine the best-sellivity of Harry Potter with the bloodlettery of American Psycho, it doesn’t feel like it’s going to turn into a good read.
If you know the answer to what my book is, please tell me. Or maybe you know what yours is?
Nobody cares about my internet related posts, so back to the other recipe. Sunday’s treat: home-made beef burgers.
Served in a wholemeal bun with grated mature cheddar, a shard of crisp lettuce and dollop of peri-peri ketchup. In the background you’ll notice a glass of 46% Arran whisky, from bottle 8 of 188 produced.
You might also notice Hitman Blood Money for the Xbox 360. I finally finished it using a guide – I just wanted to see how the story panned out. Really good game but could have done with being a couple of missions shorter.
PS. We have bought some Patak’s sauce for the next curry based on the collective wisdom of the comments. See – your words are valued here, so write some more.
Update 16/04/08: I’ve binned the sociable plugin, so most of this post is irrelevant.
You may notice the presence of two new icons under each post that look something like this:
If you know what these are, click them. Do it! Otherwise, keep reading for your web2.0 / social media lesson for the day.
First icon: vote for the post on Digg.
Digg is a news site where articles are submitted and voted for by the public. The more votes an article gets, the higher up the listings it goes. The truth: as an end user Digg is crap, I’m just hoping to fluke some search engine rankings off this.
Second icon: bookmark the article in your del.icio.us account.
Del.icio.us is a great social bookmarking site, very useful even without the social aspect. Unlike Digg, I recommend using it. In short in allows you to bookmark websites and organise them by tags, groups etc. The best thing is being able to access bookmarks from anywhere, not just the browser you saved them in.
Also, any shared bookmarks can be viewed and searched by anyone. If you’re looking for something specific then searching del.icio.us can be more effective than Google, despite the flawed nature of tags.
On the social media subject, I take back everything bad I’ve said about Facebook. It’s actually quite impressive, just initially confusing. Myspace is still shit.
Any questions?
Another new design for the blog! Though if you saw old versions of unfunked you’ll know it’s an update of an old design.
Just to prove that I don’t always live the rockstar dream of fish fingers and champagne, tonight I prepared this humble dinner:
It’s turkey tikka. I even had to settle for rum as an accompaniment.
While there are other places on the internet you could read about films, they’re all wrong unless they agree with me. Today I shall be assassinating 28 Weeks Later, I’d say the following contains spoilers but that suggests it has anything worth spoiling.
Off we go. The story is weaker than Simon Quinlank’s lemon drink – frying pan, fire, repeat. It might have worked if it wasn’t the same frying pan every time, but evolving the plot would have been a great backup plan.
People in the film have absolutely no common sense. To my reckoning the virus outbreak, and therefore most of the film, could have been avoided at least four times:
I spent the whole film hoping that the main characters would be mutilated by zombies because it’s all they deserved for being so stupid. It ruins the drama when “will they live” becomes “I don’t care if they live“.
Finally, Bob Carlisle’s zombie vanishing tricks and firebomb immunity were ridiculous. One and a half films have shown “the rage” to turn people into mindless killing machines, then inexplicably it turns one man into a zombie Solid Snake.
In defense of 28 Weeks Later, nearly all modern horror films are rubbish. What do you think, was 28 Weeks Later crap, is the horror genre more stale than old bread, or has The Departed spoiled me so much that I can’t enjoy any lesser film? Answers in the comments.
