dogpoet

Rotten time for it: if you manage to get a test tomorrow, you won't get the results until some time next week, so that really is unhelpful.

Hopefully it's something else, but just because the social distancing has kept the flu numbers right down for a couple of years doesn't mean that isn't going around.

All I can say is good luck.

While I have complained (probably at tiresome length) about bugs and fiddly controls in Skyrim, I would like to retract my whining about this game, in which the bugs are merely irritating, and which is still rather fun even with all that crap.

I started playing Star Wars: The Force Unleashed the other night, and this game features bugs that Skyrim can only dream of, linked with a degree of fiddliness that beggars belief. So after spending a few hours on that, I definitely owe Skyrim an apology...

Merry Christmas to one and all.

The old boy did get an obituary then. That's nice to know.

Another Whovian death note: apparently Bob Baker (also noted for writing a few animated films about a Yorkshire inventor and his dog) died back in November. Haven't seen any obituaries anywhere, which is surprising given how popular the Aardman stuff is.

Achilleos had a few strings to his bow besides Doctor Who, to be fair: he did a lot of work for Games Workshop and covers for several of the Fighting Fantasy books during the '80s, and was a really big deal as a fantasy illustrator. I have a bunch of paperbacks with covers by him on them, and a couple of big coffee table books full of his illustrations.

What a wretched thing. You have to admire the good grace with which the guy is handling this bombshell, but beyond that, it's a torrent of shit.

Wasn't all the baby Penguin stuff in Gotham tiresome enough?

In which case, why was the Jewish Chronicle unable to prove that they were terrorist supporters and ended up having to pay them damages?

Oh, that's right: it was because the story was unproven. Wikipedia isn't an entirely reliable source, but:

Quote

On August 22, 2003 the United States Department of the Treasury published a list of six individuals and five charities it alleged to have links to Hamas and terrorism. The list included Interpal. It described all as "Specially Designated Global Terrorists." The Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control put them all on a list of individuals and organisations with whom United States citizens and permanent residents are prohibited from doing business. A few weeks later, after a full investigation, the British Charity Commission cleared Interpal of any illegal activities, finding the U.S. Treasury did not provide evidence to support their allegations, and unfroze its assets.

They've won damages over similar allegations from the Telegraph, The Mail and those rotten meanies at the Beeb as well.

You don't give a shit about any bigotry that isn't aimed at Jewish people, and you made a point of stressing that the BBC hates Israel in your opening comments, so I'm obviously not the only bigot in this discussion.

But do show your working out that a newspaper having a long history of being sued for libel and false claims of antisemitism is a non sequitur in a discussion of how reliable they are as a news source because the most famous recent example of them being found guilty of defaming somebody involved a charity that works in Palestine.

20 minutes ago, Vagabond said:

There is a large different between interpretation and falsification.

Yes, there is and it's demonstrated in your sources: the BBC are interpreting and the Jewish Chronicle are falsifying. They're famous for doing that, and have been for years.

But I'm sure you can cite just as many examples of the BBC having to pay out for libeling people as the Jewish Chronicle has stacked up over the last four years, eh? The Beeb are forever accusing charities of funding terrorist organisations because they spend money in Palestine after all...

More cyberpunk, and this one is really odd: Alligator Alley by "Mink Mole" and "Dr Addder", who I think are Ferret (an illustrator who did a lot of work for the fanzines and small presses around the turn of the '90s with a very stylish approach) and KW Jeter (aurthor of the proto-cyberpunk novel Doctor Adder). The front matter (an introduction by John Shirley) drops Hunter Thompson's name liberally, but there's a fair chunk of Burroughs in here as well, particularly descriptions of appalling nastiness with a lip smacking relish and dry humour that's a fair pastiche of the infamous Doctor Benway. The books even broken down into a series of routines, Naked Lunch style, with Mink Mole describing his capers and Dr Adder commenting on the video footage in the alternating ones. Clever, but Adder's stuff is a lot funnier.

There may be a plot in here somewhere, but I haven't found any real traces of it as yet. Mostly it's a couple of (probably either military or intelligence agency owned) Moreau-style lab animals and their handler going beserk on a furlough in Florida. There's some incredibly late '80s mis en scene and loads of glorious art.

Hard as it may be to credit, people are allowed an interpretation of events that differ from your own. If you don't like this, that's unfortunate, but whining about it won't change anything.

And that's leaving aside the terrifying intensity of irony in the Jewish Chronicle (famous for unreliable reporting, and libeling people) complaining about a press bias at the BBC. Pot calling the kettle black or what? The paper wasn't exactly famed for its fact checking and fair reporting even before it was bought out by cabal of prominent conservative party members last year who were taken with it's ongoing feud with the labour party.

Here's another good one:

I was a bit surprised how many cosplay photos of space marines there are online, to be honest: you'd have thought more people would be dressing up as Orks. Dead right it's an awesome costume, though.

Should I be worried that I've started looking at WH40K memes?

Sounds possible. Before they started using standardised PCBs and cabinets in arcades to cut costs, there were all sorts of weird and wonderful cabinet designs, and a few manufacturers really did put an emphasis on volume or bass. It wasn't just some of the old Williams machines that sounded like Satan farting into a megaphone when they got going: Namco used to be famous for that as well...

On a less awesome note: finished the main quest in Skyrim last night, and I was a bit puzzled by the lack of any ending or anything. If you have to have to finish all of the open quests to get a final scene that won't happen because a bunch of them can't be finished due to glitches. I'd imagine this is why there was some advice to stick to the PC version and look for the mods, which presumably fix the issue with you being stuck lugging around any quest items you pick up before starting the quest for the rest of the game...

Didn't know that, because I've never played a Sinistar arcade cabinet. This'd have been about twenty years before they started putting rumble packs in console joypads, wouldn't it?

(I'm not sure, but it might have been the first arcade game with sampled dialogue as well: it was either that or the original Star Wars game, whichever of the two came out first.)

I was forgetting Robotron 2024: that one's beyond the merely "difficult" and into the realms of the beast.

Actually speaking of Sinistar (and I'm with Tigger, brilliant game) is the version on the 360 Williams pack easier to control than the one on the original Xbox one? It's a bit fiddly in that version, which makes it even more of a pig to pick up the crystals.

(That said, the XBox version is a lot more playable than trying to use it on one of those little handheld emulator consoles: who'd have thought it wouldn't play very well on a 3.5" screen using a dpad rather than a joystick?)

I bet Bunter is wishing that Jeremy Corbyn was still the leader of the opposition, eh? It's a lot harder to blame somebody from the other party when nobody in the electorate can even name them, never mind pick them out of an identity parade.

It's Carrie Antoinette I feel sorry for rather than Bunter, though...

Thanks.

Did the last two issues of that Strange Adventures series ever appear?

For sure. Brilliant game, though.

Even Tapper's pretty difficult, and I think that's about the easiest game on any of those collections.