Lying with the truth 1
Nick Clegg completed the Lib Dems' sellout today with a despicable speech promising to back the Conservatives' plans for welfare reform. The narrative was set earlier this month by the Chancellor, who justified the government's proposed real-terms benefits cuts with a carefully-prepared line:
"We have to acknowledge that over the last five years those on out of work benefits have seen their incomes rise twice as fast as those in work. With pay restraint in businesses and government, average earnings have risen by around 10% since 2007. Out of work benefits have gone up by around 20%. That's not fair to working people who pay the taxes that fund them."
Terrible, isn't it? Hard workers paying to lose ground to those layabout skivers who watch Jeremy Kyle all day. But let's leave aside for a moment the issue that with an average of 23 applicants per vacancy (and sometimes far more), the huge majority of unemployed people are in fact desperate to find work, not lazy spongers. Let's instead just take a simple look at what those figures mean in real life.
Standing on one leg 8
The office is the coldest room in my house. Facing north it doesn't get a lot of sunlight, and the radiator is directly underneath the window, so much of what heat it generates disappears outside immediately. So I have a little halogen heater to keep the place cosy in winter, which also gives off a bright and pleasant firesidey glow and saves you having to turn the light on then wait 45 minutes for the useless "energy-saving" piece of shit to actually reach some sort of vaguely worthwhile level of illumination.
(Never mind about the Iraq war – I'd put Tony fucking Blair in prison for the rest of his life just for robbing us of proper lightbulbs, the wanker.)
The heater has three replaceable halogen elements. This is the process for replacing one of them (click to see the whole thing):
I have two questions for the manufacturers.
Pornbot haikus 1
I always like to try to salvage something of value out of the most worthless commodity of the digital age: spam. Most of the cast of characters in Hell Yeah! are named after the "senders" of spam emails, and earlier today I was going through the followers on the Twitter account of my Scottish politics site blocking all the pornbots and noticed a slightly odd shared characteristic in the process.
Almost every one had a single-word biog, and as I went down the list it seemed to have a certain poetry. I had just enough syllables to make two haikus (plus titles), with four left over. If you can do better with the words, send 'em in.
The players and the game 61
"Those who have been angry about all this – don’t investigate the people, investigate the system." (Robert Florence, writing on John Walker's blog last week.)
Let's see what we can do, eh?
The GMAs: a warning from history 14
The quotes below come from an April 2007 piece entitled "And The Winner Is", concerning the inaugural Games Media Awards of later that year, written by Kyle Orland for GameDaily.com. The site no longer exists, but you can still read the article via the ever-handy Internet Wayback Machine.
(Despite these comments, Gillen accepted a GMA that very year, and this month pocketed the "Games Media Legend" prize to bookend it with. He attempted to justify his instant U-turn the day after the 2007 award by saying "The awards don’t really matter. PRs are fine. They’re just people." In a fine twist of irony he now pontificates at highbrow public events about how independent games journalism is of PR, and is also a judge in the "Games Journalism Prizes" awards, along with a number of other "concerned games industry types", several of whom are also GMA winners.)
Now the owner of the PR-driven GMAs uses their power to censor journalists with legal threats for expressing honest opinions and accurately quoting people's own public comments to illustrate a valid and fair point. Now maybe we're just old and bitter (well, there's no "maybe" about it), but it seems a pretty odd way of "recognising" games journalism to us. Unless, that is, you ponder who voted on the first GMAs (and still vote on them now), and start wondering to yourself exactly which industry it was that Stuart Dinsey meant when he said "recognised by the industry they serve".
The Wainwright Profile 42
Well, that was exciting. The entire English-speaking world of videogames journalism just about convulsed itself into a coma yesterday because someone did that rarest of things in the English-speaking world of videogames journalism – spoke openly, frankly and truthfully about something. If you've been having trouble keeping up with the dizzying pace of developments, allow us to lead you gently through the most concise and accurate timeline we can manage.
A Table Of Cowards 36
Below is the originally-published version of an article entitled "A Table Of Doritos", which appeared on Eurogamer this week, before being censored by the site following a complaint from Lauren Wainwright, who was mentioned in the piece. Lauren Wainwright is a journalist whose entry on Journalisted includes Tomb Raider publisher Square-Enix in the roster of her "current" employers.
WoSland republishes the article here, without the permission or knowledge of either Eurogamer or the article's author Robert Florence, in the interests of news reporting. It is unedited save for the fact that we've highlighted in bold the passage that Eurogamer removed. If it's libellous, as Lauren Wainwright claims, we invite her to sue us.
I hate what videogaming has become 9
Game Of The Forever 22
…is Hell Yeah! – Wrath Of The Dead Rabbit, which is out today on Xbox 360, PS3 and Steam for PC at the bargaintastic price of around £9.99. It's a heady, super-sexy crush of Sonic The Hedgehog, Super Metroid, Bangai-O, Wario Ware, Pokemon and FIFA 13*, made by the people who brought you the splendid Pix'n Love Rush plus me. Essentially, if you don't buy it you're a complete dick and I hope you die.
Extremely selective review quotes follow.