Diary of an up and coming sociopath

In case anyone’s wondering where I’ve been the last couple of weeks, I’ve been playing GTA4. You don’t need me to tell you it’s great.

Had a busy weekend celebration Damian and Nikki’s birthday on two consecutive days, with Lorna and Sam also down for the occasion. We had dinner at some morroccan place, which did terrible chips but was otherwise quite nice, and decorated like an Indiana Jones set. We then walked to St. Steven’s Tavern for a drink or two, and then up the south bank of the Thames where we stopped off briefly at Namco station where Nikki and I played Air Hockey and Skee Ball, ultimately winning just enough tokens for a couple of bags of sweets. Josh and I did attempt to play pool, but it was charged BY THE MINUTE. 20p a MINUTE! Is this normal now? Am I out of touch with pool-gaming? Just the thought of paying that much makes me balk.

On Sunday we went for dinner at Brown’s (where I took Mum for mother’s day.) The food was pretty good, although they kept trying to serve us stuff that we didn’t ask for, then getting sort of irritated when we we told them we didn’t ask for it. At the end of the meal, we went to the pub where we played on a scam quiz machine that had no money in and therefore wouldn’t let us win anything. I did almost win at Tetris (Tetris for money! Who’d have guessed my years or practise would come in useful?) but alas, it was not to be.

This weekend, I’m off to Bristol for the comic convention. Hilarity will almost certainly ensue.

This week’s column is inspired by the release of the Iron Man movie and the usual comics evangelism any fan has. If you’ve seen the Iron Man movie, this will hopefully bridge the gap between the film and the comics, telling you where the movie characters are in the comic universe, and what comics you should actually be looking for on the shelves.

Alternate Cover: Iron Man - from films to comics

Over on Den of Geek, I review the first episode of Lost’s 4th season that’s left me cold. Largely by insulting Matthew Fox’s face, but there’s more to it, I swear.

Lost - Season 4, Episode 10 review

I expect you’re desperate to see what a proper Marvel fan thought of this year’s first of three big comics movies coming out. Time was I’d have posted this on my personal blog, but I’ve arbitrarily decided this falls under the jurisdiction of Comics Daily now. Obviously, it’s different to how I’ve written up previous movie reviews, but it says pretty much all it needs to in a spoiler-free way. Best comics movie since your favourite Spider-Man? Perhaps! (Though I am alone in finding Batman Begins tedious as hell, it’s also better than that.)

Iron Man Movie Review

I’ve got a feature in this week’s Micro Mart, Issue 1002 - the pun-tastically titled “See Inside Windows” - which recommends a bunch of applications that really help you turn Windows inside out and see the useful details of things that are going on that Microsoft, for whatever reason, keep from you. On shelves until this time next week, priced a thoroughly reasonable £2!

Up on Den of Geek since yesterday, a review of 4×09 - “The Shape of Things to Come” - the first episode back after the season break. I’ve also reviews the previous episodes of Season 4 on DoG, so keep a look out!

Lost 4×09 Review - The Shape of Things to Come.

This week’s Alternate Cover column went up today! Since the Iron Man film is out today, it’s a quick refresher on the Top 5 Iron Man stories you should read, as well as the 3 you should avoid at all costs!

Alternate Cover: The Best and Worst Iron Man Stories

I’m been messing around with the site to create seperate workblog and personal blog feeds in anticipation of slightly greater separation of this sort of thing in the future, largely so I don’t spam my friends with articles they already know or don’t care about. All being right with the universe, workblog posts will only show up on my website in the workblog section, and everything else will appear on my personal blog, on facebook and livejournal.

If you’re reading from RSS, then assuming it all goes to plan, you might want to add this feed for personal posts only, and/or this feed for workblog only, of keep using the general feed if you want posts about both - livejournal and facebook users, you’ll be defaulted to the “personal” feed.

Everything should work fine, but it’s equally possible that RSS readers everywhere are about to go into meltdown. Cross your fingers people.

Guess where I went today. Not my finest piece of writing, but cut me some slack! Transcription is an utter bitch and time was of the essence. Going into Claridges was one of those moments I occasionally have where I feel like I’ve somehow sneaked in the back door of life into an area reserved for proper grown ups. I wonder if that feeling ever stops coming? Hopefully not, anyway. On my way out I nicked one of the bottles of coke they were giving out. Coke in a glass bottle is one of life’s precious, untaintable luxuries.

My plan to ask Jon Favreau a question that started “In issue #127…” using The Simpsons’ shop-assistant teenager voice was unfortunately scuppered by a paucity of questions from the floor. Maybe next time. Oh, and Gwyneth Paltrow looked ridiculously amazing in person, given that I don’t really find her attractive on-screen. I remember having similar feelings about Amber Benson when I first saw her in person. As Josh says, that’s why the call them “the beautiful people.” Can they quote Buffy episodes with pinpoint accuracy though!? If that’s the price of beauty, they can KEEP IT. (In retrospect, Amber Benson of all people probably can. COMPLETE FAIL, James.)

Once again, I am in Micro Mart this week, giving my “top 10 freeware” choices. The feature’s mentioned on the cover and everything. There’s one more article I’m expecting to see (next week?) and I’m also waiting for Simon to get back to me on three more pitches I sent in, which are thankfully more diverse because I think I exhausted a decade’s worth of Windows knowledge over the last three. Let’s hope he’s interested in ‘em.

With Dead Rising thoroughly in the can and GTA IV still a few days away, I have taken to trying to beat Hexic, aided by a soundtrack of In Rainbows and Crystal Castles. It only improves the game, let me tell you. My copy of GTA IV was shipped today, in fact, so it shouldn’t be long now until it arrives. It’s going to take some serious willpower to fit my work around it, but I’m confident I’ll manage. My current rule is to not play any games before 5:30pm, and while I’ll probably relax that rule the day I get GTA, it will otherwise be religiously adhered to. Please be prepared to see me utterly backtrack on this statement next week, though!

Gmail’s “9 reasons to press the archive button” successfully makes the case for archiving rather than deleting, but I’m still confused as to how it makes more sense than, say, leaving the mails in your inbox. I can’t be the only person who doesn’t archive every mail after I’ve read it, can I? And, let’s be honest, if you need to run a blog post to tell your users that they should be using a feature, maybe it’s not them who need correcting…