Some quotes the makers of Fracture could put on the cover

“Possibly not the worst FPS ever made. Possibly.”

“Hardly earth-shattering.”

“Several hours of tedium - guaranteed!”

“I wish I’d spent my money on crack instead.”

Nokia’s “Comes With Music” translated for the UK

Thanks to the ever-entertaining No Rock’n'Roll Fun:

Comes Without Music But You Can Pay For Music If You Like. Just Not Too Many Tunes, Eh? Don’t Go Mad Or Anything. Two Songs A Week.

Sage advice for astronauts

If you’re in the future, and you work on a spaceship, and you get a call telling you to go and check out some remote colony because contact has mysteriously been lost, do yourself a favour and call in sick that day. Skive for your life. The only reason space colonies, and the drifting spacecraft spookily orbiting above them, stop communicating is because they’ve been overrun by bloodthirsty monsters. This is scientific fact.

Eurogamer reviews sci-fi horror game Dead Space.

A decade of deadlines

Please forgive the self-indulgence: I’m celebrating an anniversary. It’s ten years to the day since my first piece of published writing hit print. The article was about journalling, the precursor to blogging, and in it I claimed that the Hitler Diaries had been written by a small dog.

I was working in Clydebank at the time, training long-term unemployed adults in basic IT - a fairly pointless exercise, because the sort of firms that employed people to use computers tended to employ young women, not ex-welders. And the ex-welders couldn’t afford to work for the sort of cash being offered by those employers anyway.

I hated it. Not because of the people, or the job, or the commute; it’s just that it wasn’t the right job for me. That wasn’t a new thing, though. Every job I’d had since leaving school at 16 wasn’t the right job for me. I wasn’t cut out to be a dishwasher, or a shelf stacker, or a production planner, or a transport manager (which sounds pretty impressive, but we only had three trucks), or a recruitment consultant, or a database administrator, or an IT trainer. I wanted to be a writer, but I figured that you needed to do a journalism degree to do that - and even if I could have afforded it, I really didn’t want to go to university or college.

So I stayed in my rut. I’d drive to Clydebank and I’d mope my way through the working day, buggering about on the internet when I got the chance and reading .net in my lunch break. Then I’d go home, eat, go to the pub, get plastered, come back and fight with people online. I figured I’d keep doing that until my liver exploded.

And then I had an idea. I’d been reading .net, and my mind wandered, and I thought about things, and I came up with The Greatest Idea For A Magazine Feature Ever. Giddy with excitement, I emailed it to the editor of .net, Richard Longhurst. And amazingly, he replied.

That, he said, is the worst idea for a magazine feature ever.

He wasn’t being nasty; he also said that my email had made him laugh. Did I have any other ideas?

Darn tooting I did. I sat up until 4am, racking my brains until I’d come up with the Ten Greatest Ideas For Magazine Features Ever. I sent them to Richard the following morning. His reply was almost instant.

When I said you’d sent me the worst idea for a magazine feature ever, I was wrong, he said. I’ve just read ten ideas that are even worse.

Richard was clearly amused by this, though, so he gave me a chance. Can you do 3,000 words about online journals for Friday?

I had no idea what online journals were, and I had no idea how you were supposed to write for print. So of course I said yes.

And that’s how I ended up doing what I do.

It’s been an interesting ten years. I’ve met rock bands and opera singers, people off the telly, comedians, authors, activists and people whose creativity is so mind-bogglingly brilliant I suspect they’re from another, better planet. And only some of them have gone away thinking “God, what an arse that guy was.”

This is what I really get a kick out of, though: I used to read .net and get really excited about the ideas in the articles; hopefully some of my articles have had the same effect on others. I used to either laugh or get really angry at magazine columns; now, I’m writing columns that make people laugh or get them really angry. I used to listen to Fred MacAulay’s programme on the way to work, thinking that it must be wonderful to basically talk bollocks for a living; now, I talk bollocks on the Fred MacAulay show every week. I used to rely on Haynes manuals to find out how to fix things; now, I’ve written a whole bunch of them. And I’m particularly amused that almost ten years ago, a colleague who didn’t particularly like me sneered at my debut article in .net and said “Well, it’s not as if you’re writing for PC Plus, is it? Now that’s a proper magazine.” Working for Plus is all the sweeter because of that.

I ramble about the downside of writing all the time, so I won’t bother here other than to say never work with children, animals or Kate Thornton. What I would like to say is that I know I’m bloody lucky to do what I do, and I’m even luckier to have worked for - and to be working with - so many great people.

And on that note, I’m going to go and get drunk. Cheers!

Blackberry Storm: better than the iPhone?

If you do a lot of typing, it could well be.

the BlackBerry Storm, Research In Motion’s first attempt at a touchscreen device, is a triumph. It’s a really powerful device with plenty of clever features, but let’s set that to one side for the moment and focus on the question people really want to know the answer to: what’s it like to type on?

A revelation, is the short answer. RIM has managed to develop a touch-screen keyboard that’s as close to typing on real buttons as you’re currently likely to get. Every time you touch a key, the whole screen feels like it’s pressing down under the weight of your finger, and a sharp clicking sound is emitted. You can switch between a full Qwerty keyboard layout in portrait or landscape mode, or opt for BlackBerry’s SureType keyboard configuration (where two letters appear in a single Qwerty keyboard button), and best of all, you can copy and paste between applications - a simple feature sorely lacking on Apple’s iPhone and many other touchscreen devices.

Childproofing your cupboards? These are brilliant

Baby Bigmouth has become rather keen on trying to find knives, bleach and matches for some kind of bleachy stabby burny game, so it’s time to childproof the kitchen. And what a pain in the arse that is. There are all kinds of cupboard locks, latches and catches, and all the ones I’ve looked at so far are a real pain to put in. So I’m quite chuffed with this:

It’s the Babydan cupboard lock, and it uses adhesive pads rather than screws. Although if the adhesive doesn’t hold, there are screws too. Installation is a piece of piss, it works on cupboards and on drawers, and so far at least the glue seems tough enough to hold everything in place (although they say it takes 24 hours for the adhesive to properly take hold, and you shouldn’t use any cupboards or drawers in the meantime. That’s not exactly practical).

There’s one big downside, though, and that’s the price: just shy of four quid per catch, although it gets cheaper the more you buy. Then again, if it stops your kid drinking bleach or stealing your cigarettes, it’s money well spent.

I suspect the catches may also prevent me going for packets of crisps when I’m pissed. Bonus!

Wi-fi, mobiles still don’t eat brains

Sense About Science has published Making Sense of Radiation for the tinfoil hat brigade and newspaper journalists to ignore.

In summary it says:

• Speculative stories about health risks and RF radiation often go uncorrected, leaving a trail of confusion that prevents public discussion and policy from moving forward.
• To counter this they wanted to share some insights, like the fact that different types of radiation exist, that ‘cancer clusters’ are unusual and that by picturing what radiation is like you see that the ‘electrosmog’ metaphor is misleading.
• Current research does not show that EMFs from mobile phones, masts and Wi-Fi cause harmful effects.
• The scientists had a look at a range of products claiming to protect us from EMFs and concluded that they exploited people’s fears, were unnecessary and generally did not do what they promised.

[Via Technovia]

[Sorry about the infrequent posting/commenting - I'm ill. From ELECTROSMOG!]

Silicon Alley Insider on *that* Steve Jobs rumour

SAI spots an uncorroborated, anonymous post that says Jobs has had a heart attack. Publishes it, causing an immediate drop in Apple share prices. O noes! Uncorroborated, anonymous bollocks turns out to be bollocks!

Time for some retrospective justification:

We viewed it as significant, however, both for those who care about Apple and Steve and as a first meaningful test of “citizen journalism.”

Meaningful test my arse.

A small, vocal minority, however–including some members of the mainstream media–believe we should have waited to comment on the iReport story until we had heard back from Apple.

How about just checking whether there was any likelihood of the story being true? Charles Arthur:

First of all: what time would it be in California, where Jobs lives? Hmm, at 2pm on a Friday in London, it would be at least 8 hours behind - in other words, 6am. That at once gave a doubtful cast to two of the points in that “report”.

Who and where could the “insider” be? Not someone at Apple. While there might be people at 1 Infinite Loop who’d work until 3am or 4am, Jobs wouldn’t. He’s got a family and, well, a life. So he would have been at home. So the “insider” would be inside to what? The hospital? Paramedic dispatch? In which case they either wouldn’t know that it was a major heart attack, or what the symptoms were.

SAI commenter Mark Centz:

Whether journalists are just plain citizens or professionals, there is still the obligation to confirm facts wherever possible.

Girls Aloud horror porn - this case could be interesting

A civil servant is being prosecuted for writing horror porn about Girls Aloud.

The 35-year-old’s 12-page blog, headlined ‘Girls (Scream) Aloud’, allegedly describes the kidnap, mutilation, rape and murder of band members Cheryl Cole, Nadine Coyle, Sarah Harding, Nicola Roberts and Kimberley Walsh.

The case is significant because the man is being prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act, which is normally used against publishers of images. This time, though, it’s the written word that’s being investigated under the old “deprave and corrupt” criteria. As the Independent reports:

A Scotland Yard spokeswoman said it was unusual to see a prosecution brought under which did not involve pornographic images in magazines or DVDs. She said: “The vast majority of prosecutions brought under the Obscene Publications Act have related to images; be they photographs, computer-generated images or videos. It is very unusual to be prosecuted for a case involving the written word.”

Somehow I doubt the story in question has any literary merit, but if the man is convicted it’s an important precedent. “Deprave and corrupt” is open to interpretation - I can think of a few passages from American Psycho (or come to think of it, the most recent Christopher Brookmyre novel) that could easily fit those criteria.

[I shudder to think what kind of traffic this post is going to get from Google...]

US VP debate rick-rolled

I know rickrolling is soooooo six months ago, but this still made me laugh (screengrab via Fark):