gaggle64

I finally finished Ruined City (utter briallance - 10/10) and I'm now blazing through Power of Three, a much lighter read but highly entertaining and just a little provoking.

Oh please god yes! I happen to have a spacious external hard drive that wouldn't say no to some new data to munch on. Save me having to buy any flash memory cards an' all.

I'd love to see Sonics level - a tight level full of those boucy pad and speed-boosters would make zany play.

It's heaven! Anything is possible!

Pot and alchaol is like weird version of Equlibrium, where everyone's been desensitised to the world around them, except that this time people are doing it to themselves. The vomiting on my trainers, flying bottles, hours of dull round-about conversations and dragging passed-out minors somewhere safe I can handle. It's the insults in the morning that do me in. "Hey, why din't smoke pot with us last night?" "I just don't wanna, OK?" "Aww man you're so dull. You should learn to relax, like me..." "Look, your sister's asleep upstairs, I'm tired and my shoes are full. I'm going home."

What I hate about any drugs or even small amounts of alcahol in a social situation is the way it completely desensitises people. I've always hated that bit towards the end of the family meal when the wine starts to take effect and then people just start spouting almost complete nonsense in gneral direcion of others. I call it "after dinner dribbiling". Don't get me wrong - I do drink, but rarely in any social situation I actually want to be in. Pot is even worse. After about the first hour of the party the maijuana comes out, the Ipod shuffles to 50Cent, I get some git mumbiling in my ear about someones arse for the rest of the night and everyone claims the day after that they had a really deep, meaningful converstaion about life and the planets. I can't stress this enough - you really, really didn't. That just isn't what pot is for. If it was, everyone on Newsnight would be puffing away on joints every night, but they're not.

Crying Freedom - Phenominal film about the true story of the murder of anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko (Denziel Washington) and the escape bid by sympathising white editior Donald Woods (Kevin Kline), from vicously racist apartheid South Africa. Laced with bitter irony, it's success is being able to poratry the blind racism prevalent at the time. 10/10

There are enough alcahol related crimes as it is without mandating other addictions. Drugs, wether it be alcahol, marijuna, speed or crack do not typically lend themselves to a productive, healthy or even happy society, and mandating them isn't likely to work out well. Giving more support to social services so they can properly support and rehabilitate drug users is the answer, and they currently don't get nearly enough funding or support for the work they do. Seriously, when was the last time Social Services was at the heart of an election campaign? It's basically their job to make sure this country doesn't fall apart at the seems. It's a fucking sham.

Me and my mates always play classic 2-minute melle. It's the only way to fly man.

Society needs a new kind of hat to wear, in my personal opinion. Something a little dressy but affordable.

Certainly teaching mysalf a language could be darn useful. I'm thinking Spanish or Chinese.

A wild stab: Versus?

For me the GC was generally one massive multiplayer extarvaganza after another. Mario Kart, Timesplitters, F-Zero, Wario Ware, Soul Calibur 2, Burnout, Super Monkey Ball, Desert Strike, Wave Race Blue Storm... but mostly Super Smash Bros. Mellee. Me and my mates played Smash Bros pretty much non-stop for more then two years, at every available oppertunity. That game kept us all alive during school. We braked for a few weeks to indulge in Halo 2. Then straight back to Smash Bros. We still play it together today. Certainly wasn't short on single player experiences either. Metroid, Wind Waker, Mario Sushine, Resi 4, Hitman 2, Skies of Arcadia, Viewtiful Joe, Rouge Leader, Pikmin and many of the above games in 1 player mode. My heart and soul still lies in the 2-minute melee mode though - it always will be.

Gahh, Batman Begins?

1. Meik - Meat Chunks 2. 3rd - Viagra 3. Konfucious - Massive taste damage!

I don't consider myself anything spectacular. I've got a decent complexion and I'm very healthy, though I could stand to start working out regulary again - I'm planning on getting back on that when I get to Uni. At the moment I'm just letting my beard get slowly more and more straggily. My friend has a beard but he trims his, but I personally would hate to that. If you have a beard you're best off leaving it to make it's own wild course, rather then risk ending up looking like Johnathan Frakes. <shudder> I also like my beard beacuse I think it gives a fuller and much more mature looking face. I could probably drop at least four years if I was clean shaven. I've also been noticing that I seem to be a good few inches shorter then many of the other guys around me. I'm only about a 5'9'', while my 15-years old brother is about 6-ft already! Most of the guys I knew at college were generally around 6ft, while my cousins remain universally freakin' huge. But they are genuinly massive people. Not fat. Not Crouch-like tall. Genuinly big, big people. I aslo suffer from a little excema, sometimes under the eyes and recently in a some what unfortunate place, which is a little disconcerting, but otherwise it's just a mild irritation. I just wish everyone would stop asking if I've been punched.

Vivendi seemt to have funny ideas about what language we speak in ol' Blighty.

Neither FEAR or Doom 3 are repetitive. In any way - in fact they're both amazing. Now let that be and end to it.

Personally I've yet to play anything that I consider a "realistic" war game, least of all any of the CoD series. Somehow being able to stumble along with what must be several tonnes of German lead in your chest due to frequent and handily placed medic packs, scattered liberally across the French countryside, doens't strike me as particulary likely. Games like BF2 are only slightly better, offering a somewhat idealistic vision of the camraderie of war. Show me the war game where you spend several hours lying in a ditch with one leg missing crying for your mum as you stare wildly at the bullet hole that used to be the back of best mates head (the bonus level is spending several hours in a Fox Hole waiting for the inevitable artillary shell with your name on it), then we'll talk about realism.

It's the classification that's the rub you see. It's a sort of form of politics within scientific thought. Take the Pluto argument. One of the arguments against it was that it had an eliptical orbit and was possibly not a body formed from the material of our star, therefore not a planet, but some kind of massive asteroid. Now we seem to be heading towards classing much smaller rogue objects that are spherical, like some of the larger asteroids. This would tend to suggest a bit of a shift of opinion towards accepting smaller and potentially outside bodies as part of a plantery system. It's this shift which could form the basis to potential new theories about how material is formed, distributed and collected by the sun during the birth of a system, how gravity affects spacial bodies, origin and other factors which govern the creation of planetoids and other objects. Expect to see some exsisting theories declared destorted or even broken later.

This is potentially vital to the future of astronomics, as how we define a planet could greatly affect our understanding and perception of how they are formed.

Having long mothballed my GBC in favour of my DS, it's ideal for chilling out at the end of the day when I just gotta catch em' all. Again. It's also good for big-screen multiplayer Advanced Wars.

I'm more of a part time Trekkie myself, but I wouldn't say no to that Klingon chair.

Ah, I see you're just like me - slowly but surely accumilating a veritable Giza-esque stack of games, until you're thratening to be crushed under a metaphysical mountain of unfinished saves.

Ok, some opinions on this thread are both depressing and angering me. I can't believe that people are seriously willing to believe that an actual, factual, real-life human being, a young girl, would be willing to throw her young life away because she couldn't watch a TV show. Some of you have positively scolded her, declaring that you would never be so imbecillic as to kill yourself because you had to tidy your room or miss your favourite TV show, and yet at the same time have allowed yourself to swallow a stupid, ignorant headline and have accepted it without reasoning, questioning, or any fact behind it. As I see the effect this headline seems to be having I hate it more and more. It has taken the life of this little girl and made it something for as all to laugh at. It has reduced the very sanctity of human life into something torrid and filthy, like a bad, crude joke written on a pub urinal wall. None of us know why this girl, this human being commited suicide. It is unnatural that such a young life was driven to end it all, but sadly it happens and TV is never the cause. Pressure, emotional starvation, fear, confusion, bullying, parental splits; these and more are the cause of young suicides both in this country and the world over, each and every year. Never television. She could've been someone you knew. Someone you are related too. Someone you love. Think about them. The people who you really know. Your loved ones. Is their life this cheap? This two dimensional? If they took their own lives, would you simply pass it off as someone having a stropp and doing something "silly", and then just move on? Do you really think you know someone because you read about them in a crappy newspaper? Quite honestly if you really, seriously, honestly believe that this young girl could be so shallow and unrealistic that she took her life just because of a TV show, even one I find as hateful as Big Brother, you are no better then Jack Thompson or the rest of his fellow video game bashing loonys who believe a violent game is all it takes to cause a real person to murder another.