Author: Carrie

  • Guns don’t kill people, Bill Gates does

    Jack Thompson rides again: the VT massacre was Bill Gates’ fault, because Microsoft published the Xbox version of Counter-Strike. In other news, Rockstar Games gets the equivalent of a restraining order against Jack Thompson.

  • Making a killing from a massacre

    Via Mr Eugenides: Another, more ambitious, would-be profiteer asked for $100,000 for five sites he’d registered through GoDaddy, including vamassacre.com and vatechcarnage.com. He covered his ad in American flags and described his sites as “Great Domain Names for a Memorial Fund Development… Our Hearts go out to all the victims and families of Virginia Tech…

  • BBFC states the obvious about violent video games

    The BBFC has published its research into video games, and there are some reasonably interesting stats about the preferences of male vs female gamers, the age groups playing games and so on. And in the not-very-surprising category: younger games players are influenced to play particular games by peer pressure and word of mouth, but negative…

  • For God’s sake, vote

    The Scottish elections take place in a few weeks, giving the country the chance to choose from the usual bunch of yahoos with slightly different ideas about how best to make the country worse. No matter how cynical you are, though, you need to vote. The barbarians are at the gates. Well, not barbarians. Christian…

  • Kurt Vonnegut dies

    So it goes. NY Times obituary is here.

  • Does your mobile go to voicemail on the bedpost overnight?

    My mobile phone’s voicemail service has been bugging me for a while: on my Sony Ericsson and now, the Blackberry, if I don’t answer a call within two rings it goes to voicemail. Naturally people only call when I’m in a different room to the mobile. It turns out that the solution is “extended ringing”,…

  • Speed kills perfect pop (and medleys make it worse)

    Here’s a wee mental experiment for you: think of the main riff from Saturday Night Fever. It’s a fantastic, swaggering, loping thing, isn’t it? Now, slow it down in your head. Not much – just a little bit. Hear how it drags? Okay. Take it back up again and the swagger should be restored. Now,…

  • Another ultra-quick film review: Sunshine

    Eye-poppingly beautiful, extremely tense and genuinely gripping. The last 20 minutes are rubbish, though.

  • Earth Defence Force 2017: fun, if you like that sort of thing. And I do

    If you fancy some big dumb fun on the Xbox 360, Earth Defence Force 2017’s worth a punt (it’s going for £18 on Amazon). It’s essentially Space Invaders given the FPS treatment, and if you turn off the voice acting and music it’s an utter hoot. Particularly when you fire at a big bug with…

  • Changed email address

    Having an email address on a different domain from my site was getting confusing (and the amount of spam I’m getting really isn’t funny – I’m deleting 100-200 spams a day now), so to make life simpler I’m moving to bigmouthstrikesagain.com. If you’ve got me in your address book I’d appreciate it if you could…