The Living Deadbeat

“[November Second]. I gotta get in shape. Too much sitting has ruined my body. Too much abuse has gone on for too long. From now on there will be 50 push-ups each morning, 50 pull-ups. There will be no more pills, no more bad food, no more destroyers of my body. From now on will be total organization. Every muscle must be tight.”

I don’t have a pull-up bar, and I don’t have a pill problem, but everything else that goes for Travis goes for me too. I’m thinking of getting back on the vegan wagon as well, provided I can find a source of protein that’s not soya-based. I have had enough of feeling like crap all the time, and dairy food, factory-meat and my 3 week absence from the gym are taking the hit for it. No more living like a pig.

(Obviously I’m not giving up alcohol).

So it appears that Dr. Deadbeat has taken matters entirely into his own hands, and has even gone as far as to sabotage some of my contributions to this august publication. While this unarguably a commendably daring feat on his part, it is also incredibly futile, because I have no life and thus spend about 16 hours a day on the internet, so I notice any changes to this site almost as soon as they happen.

In fairness to Dr. Deadbeat, the post he deleted wasn’t very good anyway, and the animal picture in it probably wasn’t up to the the high standards of cute-animal-picture-ness that he expects and demands, so here’s a picture of an anteater and its dinner bowl.

If this gets deleted then expect many, many posts about football, American politics and my sundry imagined neurosis in the coming weeks.

That’s the exact headline of an interesting BBC News story.

It looks like a small step up from the Wii. That’s about all I’ll say for it without having first tried it out. Basically, I’m highly sceptical that motion sensing control systems will ever be used in anything other than gimmicky, short-lifespan games. It sounds counter-intuitive, but I don’t think these kind of control systems are more immersive than traditional control pads. Maybe it’s just me, but I like being somebody else, be it Marcus Fenix or Sonic the Hedgehog, when I play video games, and controlling a character onscreen via a control pad is a perfectly fine way of doing that. Experienced gamers don’t need to look at the buttons. We don’t think “crumbs, here comes a grenade, what button do I press to roll out of the way?”; we see a grenade and we roll away. Yes, it happens through the controller, but it doesn’t feel like that’s how it’s happening. Maybe this is due to a paucity of imagination on my part, but I just can’t see how Gears of War 2 or any similarly spectacular game could operate via motion sensing.

If anything, motion sensing control systems are a step backwards. Traditional control pads streamline your command options in an intuitive, localised space. Motion sensing does almost exactly the opposite, making you jump and move and wave your arms like a fool. I can see how this could be fun for simple party games, but I’ll be highly surprised if this technology ever leads to even one genuinely great game. Until there’s a brain sensing device that you wear on your head and control your character with, controllers are, and will remain, exactly where it’s at.

The site where I found this didn’t care too much for it, but I’m rather fond of it.

The UN says that containment is impossible as the virus is confirmed in various European countries, the US, New Zealand and Israel. I would feel pretty smug about my underground zombie bunker right now, but it’s not built yet so I’m starting to worry.

Remember: they stay dead if you shoot them in the head!

A chilling glimpse of what’s to come.

Or undead, at any rate. Once this site is fully up-and-running it will be a place for two zombie-enthusiasts to knock ideas around, publish their idle speculations on the living dead, and display artwork (maybe – I can’t draw, but my friend is pretty good at it). It might be a forum for other things too, we haven’t really hammered out the finer details yet.

Check back here in a few days and there’ll probably be more to see, including a vastly superior theme. This is just the best one I managed dig up for the time being.