TOM FRANCIS
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Not The Finale Post

I have so many season finales to watch now, it’s like the end of the world. The only one I’ve seen so far is Heroes, which I will refrain from commenting on here until I’ve thought of a better way to deal with the spoilers problem.

This is why this is not the post about season finales. Instead, it is about these things:

Pirates of the Caribbean 3: Dead Man’s World Of End-Sparrow. In one of those things that didn’t really happen to me much when I worked in a warehouse building skateboards, I was taken to a preview screening of this on Wednesday in a stretch limo with free champagne, which I did my level best to pour on the editor of Disney Girl magazine. It is, I thought, ‘okay’. I would stretch to ‘quite good’ if this was the first one, but it lacks so much of the fun of the second that I find it hard to recommend. Particularly since everyone hated the second.

The first one was the zombie pirates one, and was good because it was breezier and funnier than you expected. The second was the fish pirates one and was great for its absurdly long, wildly overdone, bloody-minded physics-driven set pieces on gorgeous tropical islands. The third is about a big book of rules and some crabs that look like rocks.

None of them make a whole lot of sense, and I don’t recall what actually happened, plot-wise, in any of them (at the start of 3, everyone is alive and roaming around, so I assume nothing of import happened in the last two). But the third one doesn’t use its license to be absurd to do anything very fun. All the spectacular bits are just ship battles, which we’ve seen in some depth before.

I actually love ship battles, but they can’t hold my attention for long in dumb films. The reason they’re exciting is that they’re so physical – you can see the cannonballs, you can see which bits of the ships they smash, the damage is all evident and so the outcome is believable. In dumb films, such as this one, captains are idiots and the hero’s ship wins because it’s made of magic.

At one point a billion-strong armada retreat from two enemy ships, because they destroyed the flagship (because, for no reason, the captain couldn’t decide whether to fire or not). John, who loved it, argues that this is normal film logic, but the whole setup for the scene is “They can take this guy, but what do they do about the billion ships?” It’s hard to enjoy a dumb film about naval combat, politics and trickery if you’ve ever seen Hornblower, which was eight non-dumb films about naval combat, politics and trickery, with characters it is possible – nay, easy – to like.

Aside: Geoffrey Rush is still such a watchable pirate. While Depp’s drunken eyebrow-work on Sparrow gets tiresome, Rush can still just say “Arr” or a sentence of the form “X be Y”, and I am immediately happy.

Score: okay.

The reaction to my Galactic Civilizations 2 War Diary: which has been surreal. This is a ten-thousand word account of a single match of an expansion pack to a little-known turn-based strategy game with poor graphics, and no-one seems to mind. It’s not the hits or links that it got, surprising as they were, but the extraordinary comments. I just read someone saying- well, I’ll quote: “My brother and I would read the blog, then get together to discuss what he was doing right, what he was doing wrong, and what he needed to do to win.” This makes me feel amazing.

I like very much that I work on a magazine where I’m allowed to give stupid ideas like this a try. I did most of it at home or after work, but only because I love writing this kind of stuff so much. I had some New Years Objectives this year, one of which was to write something that got the same kind of reaction as my report on the Eve Online assassins – which has always frustrated me by being better-received than almost everything I’ve written since. This got a different kind of reaction altogether.

Comments at PC Gamer
Comments at Joystiq
Comments at the GalCiv site
Comments at Kotaku

Facebook: it’s like social networking, except that I like it. I’m on everything – MySpace, LiveJournal, Blogger, Twitter, WordPress, Technorati, Tumblr, Flickr, Last.fm – but Facebook is the only one that seems really smartly designed in terms of how it connects you to people. It’s good at knowing what you’ll find interesting about what your friends are up to (almost anything), so the main news feed you get from it is incredibly fast-flowing and rich in interesting goings-on.

Now I have to watch TV.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaa-

Sorry for two loud-noise video-link posts in a row, but that’s the freakiest thing ever. It’s the Fingerposer planned for the next version of Gmod. ON BROKEN DRUGS.

I’ve just cycled home from losing at badminton with Clare, there’s a spectacular sunset in Bath tonight that actually makes me wish I’d just stayed in town to watch it, I have two jumpy and bizarre new tracks from Fluxblog, it’s still light at quarter past nine, I have masses of good food to cook and my favourite kind of writing to do, and there are lots of interesting things happening in the next two weeks. A few things suck, but I choose not to dwell on them on a night like this.

Starcraft 2

It’s a game from Blizzard, and yet it’s artistically uninteresting. I’m sure it’ll be wonderful, but why does it look so vapid and plastic? These might as well be sprites, they have no depth or character to them. In the original the Zerg looked sticky and disgusting. In this they look like a breakfast cereal.

Blizzard have never had the edge with tech, but their artists always wildly over-compenstated by giving everything wonderfully exaggerated character. Even with the primitive Warcraft 3 engine, they managed to make units look cool enough that you could zoom in on them for cutscenes, and watch them talk. And as you can see, you wouldn’t want to zoom in on these guys.

Anyway, excited nonetheless. Beww!

Grrraaahahahahaa!

That is all.

Mystery Trip

I’ve been away the last few days. It feels like about a year and a half. I’d forgotten what it felt like to be home. I caught up with the London crew the night before my flight, and then with a load of old high-school friends the day I got back (yesterday? Could it be yesterday? I feel like I’ve been home for five weeks). I’ve sort of retro-actively photoblogged it in the Flickr set. It’s this kind of thing:

It was good. I asked him, after my first sip, what it was. He said it was a trade secret. I took another sip.
"Is it red wine and orange juice?"
"… yes."

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

I saw Spiderman 3 yesterday, so here’s my review of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It – unlike Spiderman 3 – is fantastic.

It’s the 1978 remake I’m talking about, with Donald Sutherland, Leonard Nimoy and a very young and very excellent Jeff Goldblum. It is a strange concept to me that a movie released before I was born could be a modernisation of something even older (were eyes even invented before then? Mine weren’t), but from what little I know of the original, it doesn’t seem like a remake the way they do them today. It’s darker, truer to its premise and closer to the original novel than the first film version, almost a de-Hollywoodisation by comparison.

Oh, I should probably explain why I’m suddenly talking about an incredibly well-known 1978 classic sci-fi film. Er, it was on TV last night. And I hadn’t seen it before, and thought I should, even though I rarely like old films, and I even less often like old films that are considered classics. Classic seems to mean ‘no longer any good’. I have some classic cheese in my fridge.

But I was amazed by this, and more importantly horrified by it – I think more so than at the Ring films. The cultural touchstone it spawned was about this idea of everyone going about business as usual, but somehow not being themselves, lacking emotion. That’s not very scary. It doesn’t get scary until so many humans have been replaced by ‘pod people’ that the humans are trying to blend in with the pod people rather than vice versa.

People have to pretend to be people pretending to be people. The film is never explicit about how many have changed, partly because the ambiguity is part of the menace, but there is a distinct turning point. Because from that point on, whenever a pod person discovers a human in public, they point at them and scream.

It feeds on two potent psychological tricks that don’t get used enough: firstly, that there’s nothing more horrifying than something that’s absolutely horrified of you. And secondly, the scariest images are also the most absurd – and potentially comic.

I came across an incredibly spoilerific screenshot from the film while digging out the image above (which is not spoilerific – it never happens in the film), which captures the most brilliant, horrible and chilling moment, but just looks hilarious out of context. It’s hard to imagine a more modern film daring to do something so easy to mock, but Body Snatchers leads up to it gradually and creepily, so that when you’re actually watching it (alone, or with people who can shut the hell up), it’s terrifying.

There’s also an extraordinary scene where pod people hatch all around Donald Sutherland as he sleeps in a deckchair outside, all born adult but malformed, and they’re oddly convincing. They make odd noises as they hatch, but not the bland sci-fi squelching almost every other film involving aliens succumbs to. It’s remarkable what a difference that makes – these things were done with puppets thirty years ago, and they’re creepier than any CGI I’ve seen.

Then there’s the dog thing. I have no earthly idea what the dog thing is all about. The film is otherwise very consistent, and even corrects some nonsenses of the original. Then there’s a dog thing, and it’s sudden and unexplained and utterly horrible, but again, probably just funny out of context. I would think if you have seen the film, it would have been a long time ago, so I’d be intrigued to know if anyone remembers the dog thing.

New-Album Deathmatch

Masses of new stuff by great people out now, so much that one might feasibly need them to be listed and detailed in ascending order of greatness. Now with links to pretty much everything! And prettier!

Ted Leo – Living With The Living

This one isn’t actually great, it’s mildly okay. The reggae-style track I linked a while back (I can’t do so again, it’s been taken down) is so sumptuously mad that everything else on the album sound frustratingly structureless and unremarkable. A couple have wonderful moments – the chorus refrain in Army Bound, the tightly rhyming lyrics of Colleen, the steady sunny riff of Costa Brava, and the anthemic outtro of the okay-pretty-good Lost Brigade – but none hold together as a full and perfect pop song the way Me And Mia, Walking To Do and Where Have All The Rude Boys Gone did. I find myself listening to Unwanted Things more often than every other song combined. :(

Score: (

Low – Drums And Guns (streaming MP3 and video, ‘Breaker’)

This is great, but coming after the dazzlingly great The Great Destroyer, seems profoundly less great than it ought to. The main reason for that is that it’s about the war, and therefore unspeakably bleak, slow and grim. The other main reason for it is utterly bizarre: all the vocals come entirely from the right-hand channel. This makes it completely horrible to listen to on headphones, and I’d assume there was something wrong with my copy if I hadn’t also listened to someone else’s. It’s feels like you’ve got Swimming Ear, which certainly adds to the atmosphere of unease, but hardly captures the full impact of being shot to death on a baking hot oil field. And it’s really just annoying.

I have plenty of room in my heart for bleak, and Low do it every bit as well as Godspeed, You Black Emperor! (oem), but Low do every mood as well as its undisputed masters. And when they do pop-put-through-the-meat-grinder, as they did on Destroyer, they’re like nothing else on Earth.

Score: \

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah – Some Loud Thunder (mp3s here and here)

Most people find the CYHSY guy’s voice annoying, including a lot of their biggest fans. I think I do, in fact. It’s just incredibly addictive, even when it’s annoying you, like tapping a pen against the desk. It seems to scratch some phantom itch that can never quite be sated, so you never quite get your fill of it. It’s hoarse, scraping, often tuneless, but I think I would need to take up smoking if I had to stop listening to it.

The new album’s nuts. I love it. I find Yankee Go Home annoying in a non-addictive way (slightly cloying), but elsewhere the honking, rattling, sing-song mess of Satan Said Dance, the conversational rhythm of Mother Won’t You Keep The Castles In The Air And Burning? (oqm, and a great title), and the Fridmannesque crackling booms of Emily Jean Stock all do something to my brain that I find most agreeable. In fact, those fuzzy booming kick-drums sounded so Fridmannesque that I looked it up, and sure enough, the album was produced by Dave Fridmann. Ha! He’s the guy who made the Flaming Lips’ Soft Bulletin sound so good, but deserves far more of your respect for making The Delgados’ career highlight The Great Eastern what it was.

Score: Fridmannesque

Modest Mouse – We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank (video, ‘Dashboard’)

I sense that a lot of Mouse fans were nervous that their uncharacteristically optimistic single Float On had become such a hit, because it’s the angst and bile we love them for. I wasn’t, I loved Float On, I love it when grouchy people find something they can’t help but smile at, but even I’m kind of glad that Dead has plenty of spite to go around. The opening of March Into The Sea is every bit as spittle-flickingly violent as the angriest moments of Cowboy Dan, and the “Ah-ha-ha”s are just barely controlled. Elsewhere vocalist Brock sounds like he’s about to lose control even on the “Shake-shake-shake-shake-shake” of the otherwise upbeat Missed The Boat, and that’s the vital thing. It’s that ill-concealed energy that makes Modest Mouse so cathartic to listen to, whether it’s exultant or vitriolic, and Dead simmers with it throughout.

Feist – The Reminder

I’m repeatedly appalled at how many people don’t know Feist. I came by her via an unconventional channel – I think it was the only time ace tech blog Waxy.org took a break from talking about social web stuff or his son to mention music, and link the video for the extraordinary Mushaboom. You’ll probably be told at some point in your life that she’s from Broken Social Scene, which is offputting (they’re okay) and misleading. She shares nothing musically with them, she’s somewhere between Cat Power and Beth Orton.

The rest of her first album wasn’t anything like as juicy as that wild nonsense, but the new one is triumphant throughout. Even some of the tracks that seem understated on first listen – Limit To Your Love; Past In Present; My Moon, My Man (video) – turn out to be full of fantastic moments you didn’t notice (how did I ever miss the “Whoa-wha-who!”s in the former?). And when she wears it on her sleeve, as she does on the fleeting-but-ecstatic One Two Three Four (video), it’s impossible not to succumb to the virulently infectious joy.

It might not be the revelation that The Greatest was for Cat Power, but it shows the same sudden confidence, and it’s just as satisfying for it. Quite apart from actually shouting “Ha!” in the middle of the lovably fearless I Feel It All, she takes on the old Nina Simone song See-Line Woman, wryly retitles it to Sea-Lion Woman (video), then proceeds to do such a staggering reworking of it that you’re left wondering what the hell the point of the original was. I couldn’t tell you with regular words what happens when she stops singing for the second time in this song, but something like ‘climactoplectic’ would be in the ballpark.

Only a couple of songs are too ponderous for their own good – Intuition and So Sorry don’t give you much reason to go back to them – but more often she finds a way to make the sparse remarkable. The soulful Brandy Alexander is soothing where it ought to be boring, Honey Honey gets indecent mileage out of a simple vocal filter elegantly used, and even The Park’s 16-bit mono atmosphere sounds inexplicably sunny. The only other criticism I could possibly level is that, when I noticed the album playing in a Seattle Starbucks, acknowledging it to the barrista failed to get me into the kind of brilliant conversation I’ve become accustomed to having with beautiful strangers in America. Her friend had put it on. She had thought it was Bjork at first. And much as I love Bjork, I could no longer feign interest.

Score: Best

 

Blonde Redhead – 23: like it.

Sondre Lerche – Phantom Punch: don’t like it.

The Bird And The Bee – The Bird And The Bee: fuck!

 

Arcade Fire – Neon Bible
Bloc Party – Weekend In The City
They’re both fine, if you like stuff that’s fine, rather than, say, awesome. They’re good news for people who like okay music.

 

Peter, Bjorn And John – Writer’s Block
These guys are hugely exciting, and I have no excuse for not having noticed them for the first five or six years of their existence. They did come up occasionally on Joy’s podcast, but there was usually something more immediately shiny like The Sounds or PAS/CAL to distract me. They’re exciting because the many fantastic tracks on this album are all fantastic in completely different ways. That icy whistle of Young Folks (video) is pulling Groove Armada’s trick of hanging a whole song on a single, carefree hook, and still managing to make it sound vital and fresh. The muffled cathedral echo of the vocals on Chills is as serene as Readymade at their best. And Up Against The Wall’s steadily mounting drone sounds like a homage to American Analogue Set.

I guess what I’ve ended up saying here is that they’re exciting because they sound like everybody else, but that’s obviously not it. The sleepy vocals (all three of them) set them apart, as the one consistent thread throughout, and it’s hearing them against such fresh backdrops each time that make it work.

 

Maxi Geil And Playcolt – Making Love In The Sunshine
Hottest song ever. It might be too sharply written to be truly romantic – “This kind of love is like the Red Brigade / What was so scary once is now a little bit quaint” – but even the call-and-response bit just sounds like violent, wild sex. It helps that it’s about violent, wild sex, but it’s more a case of the music being expertly crafted around the subject matter than any kind of inference on the part of the listener. The crescendo itself actually makes things happen to me that aren’t supposed to happen from just listening to something.

Wild Beasts – Brave Bulging Bouyant Clairvoyants
I’ve talked about this here before, so I won’t again, but in case anyone missed it: imagine if Scooby Doo could sing, and sing so beautifully that a little piece of you died each time you heard it. That is the Wild Beasts.

Siobhan Donaghy – So You Say (mp3)
The chorus in this blares, like they switched a whole other set of speakers on. It seems to come from somewhere else entirely, without stopping coming from the regular place, by which I mean to say that it is loud and great and all over the place. I was listening to it on my MP3 player on the way back from Al’s wedding, in the car, admittedly still slightly drunk from the previous night, and found myself almost unable to believe that no-one else in the car was hearing it full-volume when it hit the “Don’t say a thing about me” line.

All three of these found on Fluxblog, the best thing to happen to music since John Peel.

Back!

Since last we spoke, I have been:

To Seattle!

In America, I am treated like a king. People keep telling me how good I look, how great I am, starting conversations with me in the street, or actually giving me stuff. That last one was because they worked at the company who’d invited me there, but even they gave me more than I’ve ever heard of them giving anyone, including something they’ve never given anyone before, and informed me that this was because I was their favourite. I don’t know what it is, a lot of these things happen before they’ve even heard my spectacularly quaint English accent.

Shavin’ Like A Man!

No room for my clippers in my luggage and no time to shave before leaving, and haunted by this strange curse that seems to mean I spend all press trips absurdly dishevelled and hairy-looking (and without notepad – another curse I managed to break this time), I bought the cheapest way to shave I could: a razor. I’d been meaning to try this, but a few things have always put me off it a bit. Bear in mind that my only experience of razor-shaving is what I see on screens, and there are only two types of scene involving them:

Scene A – a sparkling blue-tiled bathroom, morning. A beautiful woman is visible in the bedroom beyond.
A magnificently buff, bare-chested middle-aged man shaves manlily, then winces and touches his cheek.
Man: Ow, it burns!
VO: You need: Nivea For Girlymen Soft Kitten Gel For Ultra-Sensitive Weak Babyskin!

Scene B – a dingy motel bathroom, morning. A beautiful hooker is visible in the bedroom beyond.
A magnificently buff, bare-chested middle-aged man shaves very, very, carefuly, and slices his whole fucking cheek open. The cut, or bloodstain resulting from the cut, will be misinterpreted later in the film.

In other words, it seems to be excruciatingly painful and almost guaranteed to result in mutilation. Nevertheless, I bought an extremely cheap razor and no after-shave soothing product, inwardly asking how bad it could really be, despite the result of all previous internal “How X can it be?” questions having ultimately been answered by reality with “Fucking, fucking”. *

* I’m partly stealing this line from Boss Nonnu, because he stole my game.

Turned out it was fine. In fact, much easier and more pleasant than electrical shavers, as far as I recall actually using one to try to remove stubble. In general I’m not the kind of adult male who’s still trying to eradicate any evidence that he’s ever grown a facial hair in his life, and therefore must be under the age of fourteen and have his whole life ahead of him. So I’m not scraping the bejesus out of my skin, but still.

Getting A New Bike!

This one, but with slicks, which I’m informed are tyres that go fast on roads. I can now verify that they do.

I stuck it to the bike thieves of Bath by leaving my old one unlocked in town until it vanished. Ha! How’d you like that one, velo-vultures? Not much fun to ride, is it? No salvagable parts, are there? Probably fell off, didn’t you? Yeah, that’s because it’s broken. I mock the socio-economic circumstances that have driven you to unlawfully take possession of my reject! Hm. Now I feel kind of bad. But I’m still pretty sure you’re not the good guy here.

The bicycle is the best vehicle mankind has invented so far. Lots of others can do things it can’t, but those need irreplacable fuels to noisily drink and messily belch out, and the whole energy equation with them is just short-sighted and ugly. A bike is just a dramatically more efficient form of human movement, an outright improvement on the most fundamental thing our bodies do. It uses nothing, requires nothing and emits nothing. It’s also a little like flying on land, which is pleasant.

At A Stag Party!

This one is not what those in the truth business call ‘true’. Al, the groom, is, like me, not the type for stag nights. So he came to my place for fancy burgers and homemade chips, then to town with others for moderate drunkenness, then the next day for a Thai meal at the only one of Bath’s seven Thai restaurants whose location I’d forgotten, then to the park for close-quarters frisbee. EXTREME.

It was good. We ship out to his wedding soon, but I have a metric Christload of work to do before then, so I’m trying not to think too far ahead.

Losing My Internet Connection!

This router has never worked very reliably for me, so I borrowed a new one from Jonty to try. I couldn’t get my PC – or three others – to see it, so I went back to the old one. That no longer worked at all.

Fixing My Internet Connection!

Which is why and how I am talking to you now and not sooner, unless you are one of the people to whom I have spoken to sooner, in which case that happened.

‘Iv’

But this is the first time since we were last in Liberty City that a GTA game hasn’t been garish. It looks serious, sombre. Try to picture a Vice City or San Andreas trailer with that music. This looks majestic. However amateurish the combat and missions have been in GTA games, the one thing they do with professional aplomb is storytelling. If they’re choosing to tell the story of a slave-trading (bride-selling?) Russian immigrant, they’ll tell it with the appropriate gravity.

They told Vice City’s Scarface tale with appropriate style, and San Andreas’s homecoming with appropriate attitude. But in Vice City I was a mealy-mouthed prick, and in San Andreas I was a sad, stupid little man. If I can’t be the mute blank slate in a leather jacket I was in GTA3, a depressed and amoral Eastern European is still a dramatic step up.

Desktop Tower Defense

A perfect Saturday-morning, still-slightly-drunk game. Like the Warcraft maps, you can only set up defensive structures, and your objective is to stop the influx of enemies from getting to the other side of your territory. They come from both sides at once, but they can neither pass through nor harm your defenses, so you can force them round a little maze to ensure maximum exposure to your turrets before they reach the exit.

This was my first attempt at a maze, in its early stages of upgrading. The choice of turrets – even once it was fully developed – was pretty guileless, but I think the maze layout is fairly efficient. I’d be interested to know what the most efficient one is. You can view the efforts of everyone in the high-score table, but the winners don’t shed much light on the combinatorial mathematics of the situation. They tend to be small mazes with two routes, and their creators presumably exploited the AI deficiency which allows you to fool them in to changing their mind about which route to take by repeatedly selling and re-building a turret that blocks the shorter route. Tricky to do effectively once they pour in en masse, but a less interesting challenge.

If you try it, submit your score afterwards and add it to the Pentadact group so you can see how profoundly you beat me.

Whoa

There’s new Low, new Ted Leo and new Modest Mouse, and all of them got As from The Onion? Why was I not informed?

I don’t often think of Low when I’m asked my favourite bands, but I really should. They’re probably third or fourth, something completely ridiculous like that. Their last, The Great Destroyer, is one of the most perfect albums ever recorded, up there with Come On Feel The Illinoise and The Greatest.

Seriously, though, is there a way I can be informed of this stuff? Is there some music release-tracking site out there where I can subscribe to each of the bands I like as an RSS feed, to be notified each time they release something? It seems like something Amazon, if no-one else, ought to do.

Noble Jedis

I Don’t Know About You Folks

I’m ill, in the way where nothing seems real. I’m not sure what to do about it, because I was already doing everything I normally do to recover from illness when I became ill – in fact, the former followed from the latter so directly that it’s hard not to assume they’re causally connected. I’m getting more sleep than at any point in the last five years, getting more than my RDA of every vitamin known to man, eating actual food more than twice a day, and keeping warm at all times – not hard because it’s unseasonably warm anyway. I’m at a loss, body. What do you want from me?

I hate getting more than seven hours’ sleep, too. Apart from giving up a chunk of precious consciousness-time, and waking up more tired than if I’d had four hours, my brain spends all its REM-sleep time trying to think of the worst possible things that could happen, then informing me very vividly that they all have. Last night I got cancer, and had huge, dark lesions all over my face, then I was attacked by spiders. Thanks, brain! That was a fun nine hours! The physical tortures are actually the highlights: the rest of the time my subconscious invents new mental and emotional traumas, and these are much, much less enjoyable than being repeatedly stabbed then flayed.

Being ill doesn’t make the nightmares any worse, but the groggy detachment from reailty makes them harder to shake in the land of the conscious. It wasn’t until I dressed this morning and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror that I realised I wasn’t mutilated and terminally ill. Anyway, all that is by way of explaining why this has lain dormant all week; I don’t like wasting your brainspace with this stuff and it’s hard to concentrate on anything else. Instead, now that I’ve done so anyway, I’ll append a less gloomy note to compensate.

(A Man’s Gotta Know His Limitations) Briggs, from the new Robyn Hitchcock album, is wonderful, and would be even if I didn’t have a thing for short-titled songs with massive parentheses. It talks about “Riding in [Briggs’] car in San Fransisco” and later addresses a girl called Mel, all of which sounded very specific and not the kind of thing you make up for rhymes, to me, so I decided the song must have an interesting origin in someone Hitchcock knew. I was a imagining a couple, Briggs and Mel, the former hot-tempered but well-meaning, the latter confused and isolated by his erratic behaviour. It turns out I may have been over-romanticising a little: Briggs is the villain in Magnum Force, a Dirty Harry film Hitchcock kept catching half of on TV.

He doesn’t particularly like the film, it’s presumably just the kind of thing that creeps into your head when song-writing. “A man’s gotta know his limitations” is Clint Eastwood’s catch-phrase in it, and the next line in the song “Or else he will just explode” refers to the final scene, in which Briggs – a corrupt official – is killed by a car-bomb Eastwood planted. For some reason Clint then utters his catch-phrase, although it’s not clear which limitation Briggs should have been aware of: inability to detect car-bombs? I haven’t seen the film, so I still don’t know who Mel is. Other songs inspired by films the songwriter doesn’t really care one way or the other about: one of Miss Black America’s, I think it’s Infinite Chinese Box. Apparently the guy was watching a film, then suddenly decided to stop and write a song about how he thought it was going to end, instead of watching it to find out. I applaud this kind of behaviour.

Infinitely More Exciting Than Anything

A very, very long time ago, a fairly high-ranking Future exec whose opinion I trust hinted – as we all lightly mocked Sony, the national sport for the past eighteen months – that the PS3 had Something Else that made it more of a contender than it might seem. I can believe Home might have been it. From what I’ve seen it’s firmly a There rather than a Second Life, in that you’re a consumer rather than a creator, but it still eclipses the rather under-developed concept of the Mii.

It almost makes Sony seem forward-thinking to discover that they’ve been going down the virtual world while everyone was wondering why they didn’t ape Microsoft’s matchmaking interface. It even lends a little credence to their rather unexciting claim that the PS3 is a computer rather than a console (“Could you make a console next, then? We already have computers that do everything.”) A consumerist social virtual world is something that’s probably best enjoyed from the sofa rather than the desk.

But why, then, on Earth, doesn’t the PS3 come with a keyboard? Accepting USB keyboards is a start, but people don’t have spare ones lying around, aren’t prepared to move their PC one, and aren’t going to buy one specially unless Sony pronounces it necessary. And without widespread keyboard usage, this isn’t a social virtual world, it’s a dystopian nightmare in which people can only communicate through the medium of emote-dance, stock phrases and a cacophony of clashing crackling nasal voices. You know how your voice sounds all wrong recorded? That’s because headset microphones have an inbuilt filter that post-processes the audio input to make you sound like a horrible prick. In those dark, chilling moments after I’ve newly reinstalled Battlefield 2 or Counter-Strike but before I’ve remembered to block all voice-comms, the first time someone actually uses it is like something from a Cronenberg film:

“Oh dear God, I think it’s trying to- it’s trying to talk. I’m going to be sick.”

Non-textual communication is appropriate for a much more exciting prospect also unveiled at GDC, this time from the ex-Lionhead guys who made Ragdoll Kung-Fu. In a restaurant bathroom earlier tonight I got a (non-textual) call from Tim in San Francisco, saying “Look up Little Big Planet. You’re going to love it. It’s like a cross between Spore, Ragdoll Kung-Fu and The Incredible Machine. Oh, and it’s only on PS3.” (That, by the way, is how to promote your system without sounding like a dick, Sony).

I do love it. I love it so much that, if the PS3 were a games console rather than a computer and priced as such, I would be seriously considering waiting a while and then starting to mull it over and straying remarkably close to musing about getting one before returning to my baseline state of definitely-not-getting-one. I would have gone with “Garry’s Mod with hugging”. Creativity and physics we’ve seen together before, but being able to latch onto things makes it wonderfully tactile, and turns the player into a physics prop to be toyed with like all the rest. It looks – and I can’t truthfully say this about any other console game – like a load of people being silly and having a great time together. This video made me laugh with a series of highly embarrassing noises that I haven’t heard myself make since I was six.

There’s a longer video here explaining the creative features, but it’s not set to the Go! Team’s Everyone’s A VIP and so is vastly- wait, there are sound-effects in this clip too. Holy God, does that mean they’ve actually got the Go! Team as the game’s official music? +58%! To its current 94% score. You heard me.

The most indelible criticism I’ve heard anyone make to Sony was simply “Come on, guys, I just want to play with my friends.” I don’t know how much better Home is going to be at making that a simple matter – I’m willing to bet that Microsoft’s old-skool solution is going to be quicker and simpler for some time to come – but there is at least evidence, now, that you’ll be having a completely ridiculous time when you manage it.

Of course, none of this really matters when the system costs, and will continue to cost for a minimum of two years, SIX-HUNDRED DOLLARS.

My Short Story For The Machine Of Death Collection

“Fuck!”
It came from the den. Later I’d learn that it had followed a much quieter, “Oh fuck. Oh-“

My first thought was that it had broken. I was going to spend a lot of time, over the next five years, wishing that I’d been right about that.

He burst into the room, crunching the door hinges and smacking the handle deep into the plaster. He nearly fell over trying to stop. I didn’t say anything, just stared.
“391! He was on the train this morning! He was one of the victims!” He stared too. We just stared. “Look it up!”
I didn’t have to. I didn’t have all our test cases memorised yet, but 391 I did know: EXPLODED. Continued