May 2012
23 posts
1 tag
7 tags
All Change Here
As I write this it is the 9th of May, 4pm on the dot. The countryside of the English Midlands is shooting past at 125 miles per hour, the Virgin Trains Pendolino eating up the hills and crests like a particularly hungry steel caterpillar. Things have been quiet on this blog as of late, and for this I can only apologise if you’re in the habit of checking in on here every day or two (and if...
10 tags
Planet Earth Live: Great - When It's Not Live
It’s 2012, and apparently live TV is the new big thing. Whether it’s Stargazing Live or yet another sodding talent show - or something I’m told is called “football” - everything is live, live, live, and if it’s not, then it’s not live. And if it’s not live, it’s not good enough. And so enters Planet Earth Live, which combines the...
8 tags
The Precedent of The Pirate Bay's Plugging
The above image is what greets Virgin Media customers who attempt to access infamous torrent database The Pirate Bay. This past Monday, the High Court has ruled that all ISPs block the website at its root in order to prevent their customers from accessing the site and potentially downloading movies, music and games illegally, and for free. So far Virgin, Sky, Everything Everywhere, O2 and...
Listen
6 tags
GTA, Parent Style
What happens when a man runs out of blogging ideas? The answer, apparently, is that he hands his girlfriend’s mum an iPad and asks her to play Grand Theft Auto for fifteen minutes. The results, it turns out, are amusing. Lou’s mum Tina isn’t your typical GTA player, but her gaming record is actually pretty impressive. She’s a 3DS owner and frequents Skylanders as often as she goes...
7 tags
A Snot-Nosed Post on Travel Nostalgia
Whilst travelling inboard a Virgin Trains Pendolino to London in Feburary, I had something of a thirst come over me. I’d long drank the fizzy whatever I’d picked up with a sandwich and a bag of crisps, and the litre bottle on a two-for-one offer - split with Lou - was long-gone. I’m one for thirsty drinking, usually, and the train’s overpriced store was my only hope. Getting off...
5 tags
Stomach Aches and Pringles
Today’s blog comes to you from a train, as many of my blogs do. The train in question is the 13.41 service from Glasgow Queen Street to Aberdeen, my ultimate destination being the early stop of Perth. The sun’s shining, I’m listening to the debut album of folksy artist Jason Myles Goss and I’m doing my best to keep a pretty heavy stomach bug at bay. I’m not one to get...
6 tags
On The "Not Afraid of Dying" Bucket List: The...
I’m not really a fan of “bucket lists”, the sort of thing a miserable person compiles when they’re looking for some sort of escape from the fact that they will, like everybody else, eventually die. People with bucket lists are the type of human being that is terrified of death and casually admits to themselves that they’ve not really done anything productive,...
April 2012
60 posts
12 tags
Film Review: Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (3/5)
You can rest assured that Salmon Fishing in the Yemen isn’t completely about salmon fishing in the Yemen. In part, it’s a pretty okay romantic comedy starring Ewan McGregor, Emily Blunt and a criminally underused Kristin Scott Thomas, and it combines fuddy-duddy Britishness with something that resembles a tight-knit storyline. It also features fish. Doctor Alfred Jones...
8 tags
Counting The Sunsets - A Short Story
Note: The following is a short story concocted after absent-mindedly sketching the picture above inside iPad app “Paper”. It’s a bit different from the usual content on here, but if it gets any kind of decent reception I’ll probably consider more creative pieces like this in the future. Without further ado, here goes nothing. The heat of the summer’s evening...
14 tags
PSA: Mobile Gamers! Download ACTION POTATO
Tonight’s blog is one about mobile games, or to be more particular about it, one very notable title which stands apart from the rest. I could’ve spent tonight writing about Grand Theft Auto III and how its conversion to mobile is a sublime work to art. I could’ve even spent six hundred words waxing lyrical about Jetpack Joyride and its amazing Retina display update being a...
10 tags
The Deception of Rango's Rating
I spent the early part of this afternoon watching another one of my favourite films, after completing a particularly strenuous piece of work. That film is Rango, the 2011 Gore Verbinski-directed animation featuring a thespian chameleon, who is voiced by Johnny Depp. Wikipedia lists it as a “family film”, and Nickelodeon had a major hand in its production. And yet plenty of reviews...
23 tags
Film Review: Avengers Assemble (The Avengers)...
So much could have gone wrong. Like do many of music’s greatest supergroups, The Avengers - I refuse to use Avengers Assemble, the UK’s namby-pamby alternative title - shouldn’t have worked. The build-up in the post-credit scenes of previous films was too drawn out, the hype too much; and yet Joss Whedon has written and directed an electric and devastatingly awesome movie which...
1 tag
8 tags
Pile of Shame #1: Bulletstorm
Alongside semi-regular film reviews, I’ve drawn up a list of games which I picked up a long while ago and never played or finished - it is my gaming pile of shame. To celebrate finishing each Pile of Shame game, I’ll be writing them up as a post like this, and you can all chip in and tell me how late I am to the party. This week, it’s the turn of Epic Games’ (Gears of...
1 tag
“In other news, @Dropbox is launching a search engine. :)”
– Dropbox’s Drew Houston on today’s Google news.
5 tags
Google Drive Is One Cloud Too Many
[[posterous-content:pid___0]] Reading today about Google’s plans to finally launch Drive, a cloud-based file storage service, encouraged some ironic blue-sky thinking. Microsoft’s got SkyDrive, Apple devices get iCloud and there’s the ever-ubiquitous Dropbox, which has more than 50 million users across the world and has recently been invested in by Bono and The Edge, the two most annoying...
13 tags
Film Review: Gone (1/5)
Gone is one of those rare films in which everything that can go wrong does. Jill Conway (Amanda Seyfried) is a woman convinced that she was abducted and left to die in a hole a year previously, but the police and her sister Molly (Emily Wickersham) are sceptical, owing to her time spent in a mental institution. Then Molly disappears, and Jill’s appeals for help fall on deaf ears - so...
7 tags
F1 and politics shouldn't mix
Hey, did you hear? There’s been some civil unrest in the kingdom of Bahrain for, ooh, about a year and a bit now. People aren’t really very happy with the King of Bahrain, but the problem is that each time they speak up, they end up battered, bloodied, or just shot. It’s not the best life to be living. But you know what that country needs? Expensive cars and extremely rich...
Watchdinkleplush:
brosephthunder:
triinket:
baraboobies:
OH MY GOD
WE DONT KNOW WHAT BONERS ARE
THIS ONE IS ACCEPTABLE
I WILL REBLOG THIS WHENEVER IT COMES ON MY DASH.
6 tags
At university? Find the skill you really like, and...
Drinking brings on many moments of clarity, previous referenced as “flow” in January of this year, and tonight has brought on one of those moments after an ale or two. The thoughts tonight, hanging around my head and staring at me from within the potential of a blank page on my laptop, revolve around the concept of recognition and self-belief, with regards to one’s own...
Listen
9 tags
In-App Purchases: When Games Stop Being Games
If you were aware of videogames at any point in the 1990s, there was a chance you probably played a Theme title from Bullfrog, and that title was probably Theme Park. Originally released in 1994 and followed up by a sequel in 1999, Theme Park was the tycoon genre’s answer to the golden question of what it would be like to run a world of rollercoasters, ferris wheels and overpriced soda...
8 tags
One month on, will anyone remember to Cover The...
After a month and a half of viral videos, divisive opinions and a naked man losing his shit in the middle of downtown Los Angeles, the KONY 2012 campaign organised by morally dubious charity Invisible Children reaches its primetime summit. Cover The Night is a global event during which three and a half million people will take to the streets of the world’s major cities and plaster the...
15 tags
Film Review: The Cabin In The Woods (4/5)
Modern horror, save for a few exceptions, is dull and predictable. If you’ve seen Hostel then you’ve seen Saw and Final Destination and My Bloody Valentine and all the rest - there’s nothing to distinguish them from each other save for a slightly different, but equally generic cast and some slightly different ways of exploding their innards across the camera lens. The Cabin...
Anonymous asked: what're your criteria's for reviewing films?