Diary of an up and coming sociopath

Token update. I find myself currently bemused by:

The Michael Jackson trial. Possibly it’s the amount of coverage that’s bemusing me rather than the trial, I’m not sure. We all know he’s screwed up, but is he screwed up enough that they can send him down the river? Does anyone even care at this point? I’m starting to suspect this is going to be just a big exercise in why a fair trial and expensive lawyers won’t do jack for you when the public opinion is heavily weighted against you, but only the kid and Jackson know the truth, and their versions of it don’t really agree. It’s impossible to tell from the outside what really went on.

Axe murderers and cannibals in London I’m happy to see that despite all our modern ideas about civilisation, we’re still basically animals. Nothing like getting hacked to bits by your enemies and/or eaten to remind you of that.

Yet more shootings in the US. Of course, across the pond they do things properly. In one week a gunman goes nuts in a church, a judge is shot on the steps, and a toddler shoots his younger brother in the head. Now that’s civilisatio. I can think of worse places for a killing spree than a church, though.

The new Stereophonics single. Nikki and I only just realised the other day that the song we’d been hearing was actually the stereophonics. It’s not great, but in a rare departure for the band it’s not making me want to tear out my own eyeballs so I can plug my ears with them. Surprisingly refreshing to see them trying to do something that isn’t shite.

The Mars Volta eponymous “decoder track” for Frances the Mute. Received it in the post the other day (it’s the B-Side of “The Widow”) Haven’t got a fucking clue what’s going on, but I’m convinced it’s a work of genius. Either that, or the band are sitting in a pile of money laughing about what they can get away with. Certainly a soource of much bemusement.

The Nintendo DS. ‘Third pillar of gaming’ my arse. I suspect the DS stands for “Desperate.” If it plays GBA games (I hear conflicting reports) it’s clearly the successor to the GBA SP. If it doesn’t, then surely it’s bound to die out when Nintendo releases the actual GBA follow up at the end of this year. The only reason I don’t think it’ll be a disaster is because Nintendo are a big company with a huge R&D/marketing team and they clearly know something about what they can sell that I don’t (though, this is the company that bought us the Virtual Boy.) However, it can’t be half as bad a flop as…

The GIZMONDO! What a name. If The GIZMONDO! turns out to be remotely competitive, then I will personally buy an N-Gage. I don’t see why they think they can edge into the handheld market when industry leaders like Neo Geo and Nokia had such a hard time of it. It’s easy to tell whether you should try to get into the handheld business: First, check if your payslips say “Nintendo” on them. If they don’t, see if they say “Sony.” If not, then you have your answer. Of course fucking not.

Final source of bemusement for the last week:

It’s now light when I get home from work. Barely saw it coming, but these days when I get out of the tunnel just before Baron’s Court, it’s still ight enough to see stuff. It reminds me of when I was unemployed and used to ride the tube at all hours of the day, when it was actually quite light instead of the dim morning/evening hues. Truly, summer is on its way. I can just imagine what it’s going to be like riding the tube an hour each way in the blistering heat.