Son of the Return of Short Shorts VI

Pure Genius!

• Doom in a browser. It's still a great game.


• Beta's Friday Game Archive. If you don't have much time don't, whatever you do, start playing Totem Destroyer.


• I'm not sure this article says anything particularly novel (or coherent) about No Country For Old Men, but I figured some of my readership might want to look look at pics of Javier Bardem naked.


• Drink labels used to choose the strongest mix. News from 20 years ago (at least).


• Oswald acted alone.


• Is Viagra A Performance Enhancing Drug?. For pole-vaulters, perhaps?


• Bob Dylan/Johnny Cash :: 1969 Sessions. Free downloads.


• Beer Is Good For You. In this report, anyway.


• Theses on Netflix. Horrid title, but interesting muse on "recommender systems".


• For my Scrabble playing friends: English words with uncommon properties

Star Trek: The Trailer

What are you waiting for?

Some trailer, huh? From a weird Thelma and Louise homage to DS9 style starship porn. Everything you'd want really.

Quantum Of Solace: A Mini Review

I read a review of The Kingdom somewhere that said it was like watching a perfectly decent movie with a vibrator strapped to your face.

Well, QoS is like watching Casino Royale in much the same way.

I hope that it is the second part in a trilogy and the overdone Bourne-isms here are an attempt to show that this is the Wrath of Bond. And that, having worked out his anger, he'll continue moving toward a smoother, suaver Bond.

In hardly any of the set pieces is an attempt made to establish the space in which the protagonists are moving or their spatial relation to each other so all the action is pretty much meaningless. Even the Bourne movies made some concession to this and Casino Royale's brilliant Parkour sequence seems oddly old-fashioned by comparison.

QoS is not a bad movie in many ways, but in its attempt to make a "gritty" Bond it has gone a little too far in the gloss removal. As I said, if the subsequent movies justify excesses of this one as a part of the journey then I will feel a whole lot more warmly about it, but for the moment I'm not so sure.

For me the best scene was at the end, it had a stillness and it seemed to rhyme with the opening of Casino Royale. Craig can be genuinely scary in quiet moments.

Son of the Return Of Short Shorts Part V

Hope and Change.

• That Obama guy sure is photogenic.


• A true story.


• Some other ways of looking at the result.


• Beaver Cleaning


• Good Old Games. DRM-free Abandonware you can pay to not feel guilty about. A great idea.


• Ten of the best circadian novels. Books that take place in a single day (no, I didn't know they were called that, either)


• Googling Subliminal


• 21 Stars We Hate. I've said before I don't particularly like lists as content but, except for the absence of Colin Farrell, this one is pretty hard to disagree with.


• Those Welsh.


• What Joss Did Next. Get ready for the heartbreaking cancellation.

And Yet We Never Noticed It

When did Damon Albarn turn in to Phil Collins? Or was it always that way?

Telegraph Lambasts Government For Giving Sensible Advice

The headline says "Absurd" new guidelines advise pet owners against allowing dogs to beg at the table, because, obviously the Government has no right to tell us how to care for our pets.

The fun thing, though, is in the first paragraph:

Chocolate, raisins or grapes are "poisonous" for pets, according to the code

I've not checked for raisins and grapes, but it's long been known that chocolate can be harmful to dogs. As snopes has it:

Theobromine [a chemical found in chocolate] affects the heart, central nervous system, and kidneys, causing nausea and vomiting, restlessness, diarrhea, muscle tremors, and increased urination. Cardiac arrhythmia and seizures are symptoms of more advanced poisoning. Other than induced vomiting, vets have no treatment or antidote for theobromine poisoning. Death can occur in 12 to 24 hours.

So chocolate is not "poisonous" it's straight up actual poisonous.

Light Posting Will Be Resumed Soon

So, I was away last week. I'm back now, though, so expect the current Short Shorts run to continue, with perhaps an occasional longer post.

I'll try and squeeze out a Short Short today, but if not now then definitely tomorrow.

Son of the Return Of Short Shorts Part VI

I can stop if I want to...

• Ten Most Difficult Words to Translate. It surprises me that there's no English equivalent of Kyoikumama.


• The Scunthorpe Problem. Probably exactly what you think it is, but I was amused by the irony that "socialism" can be blocked by spam filters because it contains a commercial word.


• Blocks With Letters On. Fiendish puzzle game with some charming between level animations, and some fine "aha!" moments. One thing to remember is that the teleports require you to press "enter" to use them.


• Playing the didgeridoo may help sleep aponea


• Star Trek: NCC 90210: The Pics

Son of the Return Of Short Shorts Part V

Obey Your Thirst!

• As a fairly regular reader of Paul Krugman I should mention his Nobel Prize which, as Patrick Neilsen Hayden has it, seems to be, unusually for an Economist, for Being Right. The Rightwing bloggers are in a tizzy, apparently.


• Krugman likes Gordon Brown, though, which may or may not cause you to question the above.


• A discussion of Pornography: “If real-world sex were a meal, the chicken would rarely be hot enough and there would not be quite enough dessert to go around.”


• Nailing Your Wife. PG Porn with the fearless Nathan Fillion.


• The Designer's Notebook: Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie! IX Earnest Adams looks at the ways computer games, and their designers, still manage to annoy us.


• Cubeecraft. Because you never know when you are going to need a boxy model of Buffy, Darth Vader or Hellboy.


• Quackle. Not exactly Scrabble, but you can sure make it a lot like that game. It describes itself as a "free crossword game artificial intelligence and analysis tool that rivals the best players in the world!"

Tis The Season

I'm pretty sure I've read this article, or something very much like it, a few times before. In short it goes something like this:

Confident, possibly attractive New York women fails to pull at some event or other.
Realising the problem isn't her, or her judgemental, condescending manner, she looks for another possibility.
She comes up with one. English men's fear of sex, say, or, in this case, English drinking habits.
Generalises to whole country.
Includes flight to notorious drinking spot (Dublin, Ibiza or where ever, in this case Prague), so she can compare her normal, rarefied society to the oiks.
Writes article about it for quality rag (maybe also gets book deal).

The hilarious follow up to this is the stampede of English people rushing to furiously agree with her in the comments, because Englishness is nothing if not the ability to look at other English people with revulsion, followed by a handful of denials and at least one sarcastic reply.

I went to a dinner party the other night. The new yorker sitting next to me was brash, rude, passive-aggressive and generally unpleasant, so I stayed quiet for the first part of the meal while enjoying a little wine to dull the pain. Later I made sarcastic remarks about her she didn't understand.

Then, probably, a second wave of responses will come when the Guardian, seeing how many hits the Times piece is getting, writes a piece asking if the English (or British, as it tends to be for these things, though I doubt that Sarah Lyall met a single Northern Irish or Welsh person) are really like that. Normally concluding that, despite the Guardian (and Times for that matter) readership being sensible people who like a bottle of red wine or two with dinner but don't have a problem and who aren't generally loutish on holiday, well yes we guess the British really are a terrible lot, except when we aren't.

Really, though, to top it all off Ms. Lyall should have made the now de rigueur trip to Rotherham and had an awful experience in a Working Man's Club. Though may be that's in the book.