If you're anything like me, you've probably been spending anything up to 0.2% of your spare time recently wondering how (or if) you're going to cast your vote in the AV referendum in a month's time. Because on the face of it, it looks like a lose-lose choice.
"If only there was some way we could improve this country's useless, broken mockery of democracy AND kick Nick Clegg's face off at the same time", is, if you're like me, what you've probably been thinking. But maybe there is.
Sorry updates have been a bit thin on the ground for the last few days, viewers – I've been insanely busy with about eight different things, and probably will be until Monday. One of them was reaching a milestone with the mighty Free-App Hero, which has now featured a frankly amazing 500 games since being released four months ago and written 150,000 words (roughly two novels' worth) about them. Yikes.
Astoundingly, that translates to somewhere in the region of £5 million saved by the app's users since it came out, and all without having to spend hundreds of tedious hours wading through thousands of godawful ad-strewn games written by escaped mental patients in order to find the good stuff.
Anyway, here are some pictures of weird stuff I saw in the park last week.
I was out and about today, and finally saw a 3DS in action for the first time. As billed, the 3D effect is absolutely gobsmacking, but even after just a few minutes I was finding it quite tiring on my eyes and I imagine the novelty will largely wear off after a couple of days, leaving you with a very pricey way to play Ridge Racer and Super Monkey Ball again. But not quite THIS pricey:
Viewers, a confluence like this comes around about once a decade. If it’s as sunny, warm and beautiful where you are as it is in Bath today, get out there and witness the phenomenon for yourself.
If it isn’t, don’t worry – you can do it indoors too.
The world moves alarmingly fast nowadays, doesn't it? But right now, at this particular moment in time and until something else shiny and exciting comes along (probably around lunchtime), this is the best game ever.
With a certain amount of irony, then, (and for no very good reason that I can immediately discern), it's called Forget-Me-Not.
Aged viewers will recall this reporter's once-burning love for the Nintendo DS. But it wasn't just the appearance on the scene of the younger, slimmer, all-touching-all-the-time iThings that caused the flame to die.
This week, with the Western launch of the 3DS just a few days away, I went back to the old stager for one last hurrah, to see what I'd missed in what's now almost two years of iOS-focused gaming and also to see how it felt to use a so-called "real" handheld console again. I found out some things, and have written them down here because I'm old and I forget stuff.
Hey! It's time for another WoSblog Challenge! WOO!
We're all familiar with the concept of Where's Wally/Waldo, right? The above is a tableau in similar vein but with a bit of a Biblical theme, taken from the iThing game Where's Jesus? Your job is simple: find the inset character (bottom left) somewhere in the main picture. He usually shows up after you've found three or four others in Level 1 (of 10).
(Click the pic to watch on YouTube. We can't have it embedded here because the repellent corporate nightsoil at Sony Music Entertainment have laid a copyright block on it and there STILL isn't a remotely decent video plugin for WordPress. This is the original TV version, incidentally.)
It's fantastic, of course. But on this occasion it's not the truly awesome thing.
"If you've got the crowd behind you, you're probably facing the wrong way."
- S. Munnery
Reality
"Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose. This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children, not Fate that butchers them or Destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It's us. Only us."
