You’re right, it’s in there. Thanks.

Try suggesting to a hard-line socialist that Reagan did anything to help end the Cold War. You’ll quickly hear a lot about how the USSR was drawing to its natural end anyway and that everyone knew it — anything but admit that losing the arms race might have had anything to do with it.

> Have you seen titanic?

Yup. Couldn’t take my eyes off the screen. Excellent, I thought.

For what it’s worth, my dad, who was in the Merchant Navy and therefore had to study the disaster in great depth, reckoned they didn’t make a single mistake, unless maybe the lights should have gone out a few minutes earlier.

For the life of me I can’t remember where it is. You can definately disable all notifications. I remember because I saw someone whinging that you can’t selectively do it – turn off notifications that people are on-line but not turning off invites and so on. Try in personal settings for your profile. (Press the centre button)

I’ve never met anyone like that. Actually I was starting to wonder if I’d dreamed the whole ‘glasnost’ (sic) thing so little does it get recalled these days.

Man, do I sound old.

Have you seen titanic? If you’re still marveling then jesus, that’s one seriously bad film.

>You can suppress Xbox live messages, I believe.

Yeah, there’s an option to do that somewhere. I saw it once, but i can’t remember where. It’s just like windows really, isn’t it?

Don’t worry about missing that: it’s one of those rare cases where the preview audiences were right and the director was wrong. The only reasons to watch the director’s cut are (a) to marvel at how adding loads of extra stuff can turn a great film into a shite one, and (b) to marvel that James Cameron is capable of something that bad.

Although, come to think of it, it may not have been the doing of preview audiences. Without wanting to spoil it for you, the director’s cut is a Cold War paranoia film. I reckon the Berlin Wall must have come down, rendering half the plot obsolete, sometime between filming it and releasing it — although, let’s be clear, it would still have been bad even if it hadn’t been anachronistic. It’s kind of weird, actually, seeing the way Gorbachev’s portrayed: not even the faintest hint that he might be slightly different to, say, Breshnev. So there is a third reason to watch it, then: an antidote to those people who tell you that “everyone knew” that the USSR was going to collapse “inevitably”. I think The Abyss was made in ’87, maybe ’86.