In your electronic arms

Alert WoS viewers will have seen this a while ago, but as it’s my all-time favourite piece of videogames-related art it’s worth repeating for the hundreds of new readers of WoSblog. Once you’ve grasped what it is you won’t expect that you’re going to watch all nine minutes of it. But you will.

This is who I want to be when I grow up

This is such a lovely thing.

(Salute: alert WoS viewer Subman.)

Capitalism is awesome

WoSblog is planning a two-person weekday trip to London soon. A simple enough undertaking, right? But of course it isn’t. Ever since the UK’s railways were privatised by lovable Mrs Thatcher, it’s a well-documented fact that (a) we have the most expensive rail network on Earth, and (b) trying to find out the best and cheapest way to travel between any two points is an insane labyrinthine nightmare of routes, operators, countless different ticket types and “magic stations” – places in the middle of your journey where for no obvious reason you can mysteriously slash the price of your ticket by pretending to make your journey in multiple stages, even though you never actually get off the train or even change seats.

We’re all DOOMED!

There’s been something of a Biblical flood of the-end-of-civilisation movies in recent years. From 2007’s 28 Weeks Later (zombie plague) and I Am Legend (cancer cure gone wrong) to Charlie Brooker’s harrowing alleged comedy Dead Set (another zombie plague), the BBC’s remake of Survivors (lethal virus pandemic) and the same broadcaster’s re-remake of The Day Of The Triffids (er, homicidal walking plants), 2009 mega-budget effects-fest 2012 (the classic “solar flares cause planet to boil from the inside”), and right up to this year’s The Road (unnamed catastrophic event), the cultural world is suddenly alive with the mass culling of humanity. Hurrah!

The one avenue for the obliteration of mankind that hasn’t been explored for a while is the classic nuclear holocaust, even though – or possibly because – an increasingly aggressive and powerful Russia has been rattling its sabre on the world stage for the first time in two decades. However, with the imminent The Book Of Eli making reference to a war that leaves the planet a ravaged wasteland, it looks like the atomic menace is back, Back, BACK! Which got WoSblog thinking – what’s the bleakest nuclear holocaust movie ever?

Free subs to Develop

Actually-worth-reading games industry trade mag Develop has launched a rather generous offer for January: subscriptions to the print editon of the magazine (normally £35) are now free. Develop is full of actual proper features about game development and the world of gaming in general, and while the online version has been free for some time you can’t beat having paper and ink in your hands instead of twatting around with PDFs that you can’t read properly on a screen less than 40 inches across. Click the image for more info.

Or click here to sample the online edition and see what you’re getting.

Argument of the day

Starts at 21.44 here:

(Courtesy of alert viewer S. Byron.)

Apple tablet officially confirmed

Not by Apple, admittedly. But Stephane Richard, the incoming CEO (and current vice-president) of mobile phone company Orange (one of Apple’s European network partners) appears to have inadvertently let the much-rumoured cat out of the bag. In an interview with French TV station Europe 1, the following exchange (translated) takes place:

Interviewer: According to [French magazine] Le Point, your partner Apple will be launching a tablet
Stéphane Richard: Yes.
Interviewer: … equipped with a webcam.
Stéphane Richard: Yes.
Interviewer: Will Orange customers also be able to enjoy it?
Stéphane Richard: Of course!, they will actually particularly enjoy it because the webcam will allow live video streaming. It’s a new take on mobile video-conferencing.

My schoolboy French seems to back up the internet translation, but you can check the interview out for yourself here if yours is better:

L’interview politique de Jean-Pierre Elkabbach

(Skip to 6.12 or so.)

2012

Just got round to watching last year’s apocalypse blockbuster. Didn’t realise the title was actually a rating out of 10 for how prodigiously, stupefyingly awful the last 30 minutes were.

Geoff Whiting, Mr Comedy

A significant number of years ago, I and WoSblog associate J Nash used to be regular attenders of the weekly Comedy Cavern comedy club in Bath. Located in the tiny cellar of a popular studenty pub on Sunday nights and able to seat maybe 30 people and cram in another 30 or so standing up, it featured both up-and-coming and established acts at abnormally low prices. Robin Ince, Ross Noble, Brendon Burns and an astonishing, paint-blistering set from Jerry Sadowitz were just a few of the highlights from tickets costing just £3 or £4.

The club kept putting on good acts, but after a few months we both had to stop going, and the reason was the compere. Agonisingly, murderously awful, he would systematically annihilate every last scintilla of atmosphere with dreadful audience “banter” and reading out headlines from the local newspaper for what felt like hours at a time. Combined with the hard wooden seats and the endless intervals (compere-interval-compere-support-interval-compere-interval-headliner wasn’t an uncommon running order), by the time the main act finally went onstage you’d be in such an abysmal mood of barely-suppressed rage that almost nobody could be funny enough to compensate for the previous two hours of torture.

One last look backwards

Props to John X.