The Nintendo Revolution Controller. That, right there, is total genius.

Also, see the video on Satan’s Own Gaming Website if you’re still not convinced.

The Burninator has posted an article that not only does not offend me in a million different ways, but that is actually worth reading. I mean, I still don’t completely agree with everything he says, but still, pretty amazing nonetheless.

Christianity Today has an article on Impractical Christianity which is well worth a read. Sin and holiness aren’t two of my favourite topics, but I like “lifestyle” Christianity even less 🙂

Whatever you’re doing right now, stop it, head over to Play Asia or Lik Sang and order yourself a copy of Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! If you don’t have a DS, you’ll want to buy one of those, too. Why should you buy it? This is why:

A big-ass samurai dude is trying to make pots. He is having difficulty with his pots. They’re all coming out wrong, like little tree spirit things, rather than like pots. He’s getting very angry and frustrated, and he can’t sell his pots to make any money. So, finally, desperate, he yells out “OUENDAN!”, and the super-special Ouendan taskforce turned up. These are no normal superheroes, though. Ouendan are three six-foot tall dudes with slick hairstyles and sunglasses, wearing long black trenchcoats. Oh, and they’re cheerleaders, too. As they dance to the funky sounds of Japan’s hottest pop artists, the pot maker finds his mojo again: he spies a young lady emerging from a lake and creates a pot with a mermaid on it; he goes to a club and uses the turntables as a pottery wheel, creating funky pottery for the dancers in the club! He is happy! Ouendan have done their job and another citizen can rest easy knowing everything is back to normal. Hoorah!

You see now?

And that’s just one level of this game.

Merseyside Police have asked people not to ring 999 to ask where to buy fuel after phone lines became strained.

At 8:00am local time, on a train on his way to work in Tokyo, my brother emails me a picture of his new girlfriend from using his mobile phone. It pops up in my inbox in Manchester whilst I’m talking to an old schoolfriend who now lives in Boston, USA. I reply to my brother expressing my approval of his choice in ladies, and he replies to me recommending some strange Japanese post-punk industrial extreme hardcore band he saw last night. At the same time, Cathy and I are arguing the morality of animal testing from the perspective of a vegetarian. For a short while, from the comfort of my sofa in Manchester, my world spans nearly two-thirds of the way around the globe and covers 13 hours of timezone difference. The world is simultaneously enormous and tiny, and even though I’ve got a pretty good idea of how most of it works, the sheer scale of the internet never ceases to amaze me.

Melt Banana. They have an album called “13 Hedgehogs”. It has 56 tracks, each of which is a minute or so long, and is basically hardcore industrial post-punk Japanese noise. They’re on iTunes, and I’m half tempted to get the album for sheer “OMGWTFBBQ?!” value.

There’s too much music in the world. Some of it is really, really good, and I’m not listening to it. So I’ve started to put together a list of bands that most people haven’t heard of that I should probably be listening to. It’s here. There’s not much on it, though, so it needs padding out. So, if there’s a band that you’ve heard of that nobody else has that you think I ought to be listening to, tell me and I’ll add it to the list.

So, there was a free 14-day trial of World of Warcraft on PC Gamer. I thought “Hey, what harm can it do? The full game normally costs £35 and £8.99 a month, and it probably won’t even work on my laptop anyway, and I don’t really like RPGs, so I can just uninstall it after the trial is up, and I’ll be able to say ‘Yeah, I tried that and didn’t like it’ and everything’ll be fine…”

Yeah, right. If anyone wants me, I’m enparm, a dark elf druid on Bloodhoof.

You’ve probably seen the story – some kid finds porn on his phone, his parents go ape, Tesco apologise because it had been in for repairs there and must have got on there because they “used a circuit board from another phone.”

Call me cynical and suspicious, but I’m betting the sequence of events actually went like this: Boy trashes phone, sends it to Tesco for repairs. Boy gets phone back, downloads hardcore porn onto it. Boy’s parents find porn, go apeshit. Boy panics and, casting round for an excuse, says “It wasn’t there before I sent it to Tesco! It must be their fault!”. Parents blame Tesco. Everybody happy.

I mean, c’mon, you’d have done the same, right?