Sequels:

• Amped 3 (2K Games)
• Call of Duty 2 (Activision)
• Dead Or Alive 4 (Tecmo)
• Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (Bethesda)
• Final Fantasy XI (Microsoft)
• Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter (Ubisoft)
• Madden NFL 06 (EA)
• NBA 2K6 (2K Games)
• NHL 2K6 (2K Games)
• Perfect Dark LE (Microsoft)
• Project Gotham Racing 3 (Microsoft)
• Quake 4 (Activision)
• Ridge Racer 6 (Namco)
• Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland (Activision)
• Top Spin 2 (2K Games)

New titles:

• Condemned (Sega)
• Saints Row (THQ)
• The Outfit (THQ)
• Kameo: Elements of Power (Microsoft)
• Gun (Activision)
• Full Auto (Sega)

Games that I care about:

Read this story to the end. The last page is really important.

Everything in this room is eatable. Even I’m eatable. But that is called cannibalism, my dear children, and is in fact frowned upon in most societies.

Well, that was like nothing else I’ve ever seen before. Imagine, if you will, a cult. A cult consisting of 22 crazy, happy Americans, all wearing identical blue choir robes with a red electric flash across the front. They are led by a charismatic frontman who looks uncannily like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, and this cult’s mission in life is to sing bombastic, over-the-top sunny pop songs to the world and make everyone smile. A lot. They sing about the sun, and how much they love everyone, and the sun, and smiling, and the sun.

It all started with a town crier and his son, who rang the bell and proclaimed the coming of the Spree; and then, for the next hour and a half, we were treated to a show not unlike the sort of thing you’d experience if you dropped a tab of acid during a Pentecostal worship service. People in the audience were wearing choir robes and shook tambourines; the percussionist climbed up the rigging several times to bang his cymbal over the heads of the choir who danced as if undergoing some sort of shamanistic ritual. There was a theremin solo, and at the end of it, the theremin player asked the guitarist to marry him. I think he may actually have meant it, too.

There isn’t another band quite like The Polyphonic Spree, and I don’t think I’ve ever experienced anything quite like their live show before. Awesome stuff.

I’ve added A Bad Christian Blog to the links list on the left. It’s a fascinating read, and I think he says a lot of things I’d like to say, but more articulately and, er, stuff.

The label “Bad Christian” is an interesting one; it’s one I’d apply to myself – for several reasons. First of all – and mainly – there’s the closet Calvinist in me who is aware of his total unworthiness and sinful nature, and the knowledge that I am, as compared to Christ, not exactly spotless. That’s the answer that doesn’t upset too many people, and consequently, it’s perhaps the one I’m less interested in, even if it’s more important theologically.

The more provocative reason is that the kind of person who uses the label “Good Christian” and “Bad Christian” tends to be the kind of person who attaches political and absolutist moral meaning to those terms – that is, a “Good Christian” is one who votes conservatively, condemns homosexuality as sinful, is anti-choice (sorry, pro-life – that’s another rant, anyway), and who places a high value on individual “holiness” and “purity” – and, more significantly, is someone who speaks out on those issues. A “Bad Christian” is someone who, well, doesn’t. And I don’t, because on one level I think a lot of that stuff is culturally bound and as such a simple, literal reading of the Bible doesn’t count for much, and on another level I think it’s utterly hypocritical to be whinging on about things like your kids doing marijuana and watching TV after 9 at night when there are hundreds of thousands of people dying every day as a result of global injustice, curable diseases and unacceptable poverty.

Tony Campolo said this:

First, while you were sleeping last night, 30,000 kids died of starvation or diseases related to malnutrition. Second, most of you don’t give a shit. What’s worse is that you’re more upset with the fact that I said shit than the fact that 30,000 kids died last night.

That quote so neatly sums up exactly what is so fucked up about the church today; it makes me cry every single time I read it.

(the badchristian himself has a very good post on why he calls himself that)

If you are looking to start your own independent chocolate fountain rental business, or if you are a hotel, restaurant, or caterer looking to expand your current business, then you have come to the right place. Chocolate On Demand can help you get started in the lucrative chocolate fountain rental business.

Man, I am so expanding my occasional wedding photography business into chocolate fountain rental, too. Look, it says there – it’s “lucrative” and everything.

Chocolate On Demand

It’s not every day you get a phonecall from halfway across Europe asking you to look at a random website. It’s even less often that that website happens to show your flatmate standing in front of what purports to be Santa Clause’s house at the edge of the Arctic circle in Finland. Well, not every day, unless you live with Jez, in which case this sort of thing is what passes for normal. Anyway, as proof, here’s a screengrab of him standing in front of their webcam (click for bigger):

I didn’t ask him if there was any arctic circle candy (or Italians, come to that) there. I probably should have done.

Apparently – get this, you’ll never believe it; this is really groundbreaking stuff – it turns out that women, right, women like rich, powerful, good-looking men! No, seriously! I know it’s hard to believe, but it says it right here on t’internet so it must be true!

Also – it just gets more and more shocking – it turns out that men who spend a lot of money on expensive haircuts and moisturiser[1] aren’t actually sensitive, caring and in touch with their feminine sides at all – they’re just really, really vain and self-centred! Who’d of thunk it, eh?

Next up: ground-breaking research shows that men like “breasts”, that water is “wet” and that politicians “lie”.

[1] I mean, men other than me who spend money on expensive haircuts and moisturiser.

I’ve just got back from a weekend in Norfolk with my parents, where I walked around Norwich a bit, had a nice Thai meal, was persuaded that perhaps the new Focus isn’t altogether terrible (although it probably helps that my dad got the 2.0l Turbo diesel with every accessory known to man), and potentially talked my Dad into buying a 17″ Powerbook. For himself, sadly, not me. Ah well.

When submitting your code for testing, make sure you’ve got rid of all your debug messages, or the test suite will complain that your code is producing the wrong output, because diff is not intelligent enough to ignore lines like “W00t! It’s working!” and “Preparing to hack… hacking… hacked!”.

In other news, I got an error message today telling me I had insufficient magic in my pot. That was interesting.