The Bard

If it was open that's an example of me just not fully getting Milton's verbiage. The exact lines are: "One gate there only was... Due entrance he disdained, and in contempt, At one slight bound high overleaped." Satan's so metal. Paradise Lost needs to be turned into a black metal album vocalised by Christopher Lee. Edit: That's a pretty good example, and obviously it's Milton so there are obviously going to be examples of amazing verse in every context, I was just saying that the genuinely stunning passages occur more in the dark, fiery and baleful places. The rhythm of the meter in the first and second book just tends to be so much more imperial and full of syllabic stress in quick sequence, which I personally prefer to the mellifluous flow of the passage you quoted above.

I really enjoyed the shit out of Wolfenstein, it has, embarrassingly, the best (or least shitty) story of any triple-a game in 2014.

Reading Book IV of Paradise Lost again, just gotten to the part where Satan's having an emo tantrum and trying to decide whether he should just squash the beef with god, but eventually is like "that shit be unseemly yo, time to go fuck up Adam and the rib lady." Definitely getting the vibe that Milton wasn't so much into the whole eden/god/Jesus thing because the descriptions of verdure and sumptuous landscapes just comes off as limp compared to the absolutely explosive and evocative descriptions of Hell and Satan. I mean, compare probably the best lines written in the English language: "Him the almighty power Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky With hideous ruin and combustion down To bottomless perdition, there to dwell In adamantine chains and penal fire, Who durst defy the omnipotent to arms" with "Insuperable height of loftiest shade, Cedar, and pine, and fir, and branching palm, A sylvian scene, and as the ranks ascend, Shade above shade, a woody theater Of stateliest view." A bit perfunctory. Not really feeling it are you Milton?

I'm going to listen to the Steven Wilson record that just came in the post and take a nap on my couch. The idea of doing this is sexually arousing to me right now.

Riffing off the above, since I'm playing Metro 2033 again, the detail and atmosphere of the world is completely ruined by the awful NPC animations. It makes it a thousand times more jarring to look at a poorly animated character when she exists in a beautifully created world.

Thinking back on it AC4 was such an amazing game. Absolutely gorgeous too.

Well the good news is that it's a whole lot of fun.

Now you've got a chance to get into her. Hey oh!

Yeah, it just seems like PS4 is still a better option for me right now for social gaming than PC. Since most of my friends started working, our ventrilo channel is pretty much deserted and there's none of that good old student loan cash to spend on component upgrades . So there's no really worthwhile online experience yet huh? Might just wait until destiny then I guess.

I'm thinking about getting a PS4 this weekend. What multiplayer games do you guys tend to hit up on a regular basis? @Daft, Watch Dogs is really crap. Could go on, but I feel like it doesn't deserve my words.

Just finished reading This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald's first novel and it's crazy how much of a contrast it is to his later work. The authorial voice is so much stronger, and the ideas aren't as implicit, but he flat out uses the protagonists as tools for direct commentary on pretty much everything he wants to talk about. Which was great, it gave it a sort of oratory and rhetorical feel in parts whereas I didn't feel that for example, Gatsby, or Tender is the Night had that about them. Also started reading an anthology of Lovecraft stories. Got through Mountains of Madness and Call of Cthulhu. Cthulhu was great, short, engaging investigative horror fiction. I didn't expect the beauty of expression that it has in parts. Mountains of Madness is probably the most frustrating thing I've ever read in my life though. Full to the brim with unnecessary background technical information about Pleistocene rock formations, geology, evolutionary biology etc. There one section that's literally an exposition about how drill bits work. It took some patience to get through, because instead of being explanatory either contextually or explicitly, it just threw out these terms and expected you to have an encyclopaedia at hand. I suspect it was there more to make the reader think "gee isn't he a clever fucker," than anything else. Except in reality she's thinking "why do I need to know about drill bits in a story about tentacled space monsters?" Either way, the ideas are incredible. The horror doesn't come from the unknown, but from the unknowable; the idea that there are things lurking in the universe that our senses can't...well, make sense of, or understand, whether that's because they're dimensionally composed in a way that's alien to us, or have an evolutionary history that's completely separate from our own. Need to read more, but I'm going to have to be wise about what I select since Cthulhu was great, but Mountains of Madness was only tolerable for the last third (which is where it got pretty good).

They're all variations on competitive gaping. Except for the Lebanese midgets, obviously.

Fuck that, the lean look suits you. I've let gym work slide for so long that I don't even know where to start anymore.

Zechs read about enumerative induction in a logic 101 textbook and spends his days tragically applying it to all aspects of human existence.

Oh yeah, that has a similar vibe, seems like a crazy ambitious project as well. A team of four extrapolating entire ecosystems from a series of algorithms? Seems like something an evolutionary biologist would be into rather than a videogame developer.

This is probably like the best looking game on next gen consoles.

This game is just so joyless, charmless and humourless. I feel like I've been staring into space after playing it for any length of time. There isn't a single character that I don't hugely despise.

The problem is that when a machine's vehicle, indication or sign recognition software (as well as everything else in the car that's digitised) malfunctions, nobody is going to know unless there are detectors in place for every possible contingency. A slight error in a high risk situation will be enough to cause a major disaster. In contrast, when a human has dementia, it's both obvious to the person in question, and everyone she interacts with. So until Google programs an all encompassing artificial intelligence that has tendrils in every aspect of the hardware it's operating, I don't think I'd trust this thing to perform all the functions a human being can perform so intuitively.

I've played it for a good ten hours and I can't figure out why it's an open world game.

You'll be fine in the moment, it's the anxiety leading up to the deed that's the killer. Maybe take some inderol. You've got some serious stones doing an hour lecture though, I had one ungraded ten minute presentation to give this year for my Masters and I fucked off abroad .

Spoiler: Black Flag is a much, much better game.

Apart from the specious problems people have brought up about dynamic lighting and other marginal shit, how are people finding the experience of playing the game?

Dude, fuck that, get the drum kit let's start an N-E post rock, shoegaze band.

Bought this off cdkeys.com for £25.99 last night and it's installing now. Soups excited.

Haven't seen it but I love the Cornerhouse. Although I had the world's worst date there when I was 18. Took a girl to see Control and her brother was in the row in front giving me the hound eye through his stinky dreads. Anyway, just watched Starter For 10. Would be a fairly generic university/ coming of age film in the John Hughes mould if it wasn't set in 1980s Bristol and centred around a nerdy kid whose lifelong ambition is to make it to the university challenge team. I have a soft spot for understated character films like this, and I like the way it's a recontextualised genre film, and quite amicable while still reminding you of all of the absolutely humiliating times you had being an utter callow goon at uni, and that one girl that was always so much of a dick that it kept you pining while completely missing the other one who had a crush on you and wouldn't inadvertently decimate your psyche.