US evangelists are twisting the Bible to say that beating the young is a Christian doctrine.

For the under-one-year-old, a little, 10- to 12-inch long, willowy branch (stripped of any knots that might break the skin) about one-eighth inch diameter is sufficient

Get. Out. Of. My. Church.

Punks didn’t wear flowers in their hair, hippies did.

Also, MySpace, please stop producing bands. They’re all uniformly awful. KTHXBYE.

Woohoo! I’ve beaten it! Half Life 2’s installer, that is. Almost as much fun as the game itself, although not quite.

First, the DVD doesn’t work in my PC. But “Ah!”, I think, “That clever Steam thingy should just let me activate the game and then download it!”. So I enter my key into Steam – and it asks for the DVD. Hm. Try again.

I check the DVD in my laptop – it works there, but my laptop sure as hell won’t run Half Life 2 – at least not in any way that you’d want to play it. However, my laptop does have an external USB hard drive. Sooo… copy all the install files to that, then plug the hard drive into my PC and install from there. Woot! It’s installed! Double click on Half-Life 2, enter activation key and… “Please insert DVD”. Bah, foiled again.

How about… Steam keeps track of games online, doesn’t it? So if a game is activated in my account, I should be able to play it anywhere, right? Hmmm… So if I install Steam on my laptop and activate it there, I ought to be able to play it on my PC, right?

Cup of tea first. Ah, that’s better.

Woohoo! Half Life 2 activated! Now, turn off laptop and connect to Steam again on my PC.

Oh. Why does it keep telling me to pay for Half Life 2? Quit, reload. Still telling me to pay for it. Reboot PC. Still telling me to pay for it. Something not right here.

Wait, what? I have to tell Steam to log me out and then log back in again for it to notice I’ve activated a new game? That’s retarded, that is.

But… w00t! It works. Three hours later, I finally have Half Life 2 working. Brilliant. If only all installs could be so simple.

Oh, and in other news, Starship Troopers doesn’t work, so I don’t know if it’s any good or not.

Apparently, right, Sony didn’t copy Nintendo’s controller idea. I mean, I know how it looks – Nintendo announcing their all-singing, all-dancing motion-sensing position-sensing WiiMote earlier this year, and then Sony announcing some months [i]afterwards[/i] that they’ve got some half-assed tilt sensor in their controller, developers not getting wind of it until a month or so before E3, and nothing actually being delivered to developers until the weekend before E3 – but really, it’s all to do with technology becoming available, and nothing to do with trying to take the wind out of your opposition’s sails by half-assedly ripping off their gimmick. At least, that’s according to Sony’s irritatingly self-satisfied mouthpiece, Phil Harrison, in his interview with Der Spiegel Online.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: How do you respond to people who say you stole Nintendo’s idea for a motion-sensitive controller?
Phil Harrison:On one level I understand why people say that. But it’s a little stupid, if you don’t mind me saying so. When we launched Playstation in 1994 we introduced the concept of real-time computer-generated 3-D-graphics for the first time. That was the innovation that drove the platform. When Nintendo
released the N64 in 1996 and they had real-time CG 3-D-graphics, did you hear us say, “Nintendo, you’ve stolen our idea?” Of course not.

There you go. Before 1994, there was NO SUCH THING as real-time CG 3D-graphics. Anyone who says otherwise is clearly lying.

Also: Sony’s E3 Press Conference in One Minute – possibly the most pathetic thing you will ever see. Ever. It’s Ridge Racer! RIIIIIDGE RACER!