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).

(Mr Chainsaw and Dr. Deadbeat on holiday)

That bloody cretin (you know who you are…Mr. Chainsaw) has only gone and taken the last bloody needle from the haystack that broke the camel’s back in his never ending war on the day-to-day malignancy that is my life. On top of forcing me to go on holiday (all the way to Amsterdam to see a band I didn’t want to see) he twisted the knife in my back by booking a double room only three feet wide and four feet long. It had a window so small I couldn’t fit my hand out, no wardrobe and a disgusting pit of a communal bathroom. Oh ya, and it was on a bloody boat. It was like living in a very small sauna with bunk-beds and a man who remains naked for like an hour and half after his shower. Would it kill you to put on some underpants you bastard!?

(Artists impression of what Mr.Chainsaw might look like actually wearing underpants)

Until next time old friend.

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.

More menus should use the elipsis (the “…”). It gives the food service industry the dash of suspense it dearly needs.

Picture taken by “Dutch Mechanic” on http://topcultured.com/food/a-real-mans-soup-of-the-day/

Not to be outdone by their lower profile cousins (see Stoned Wallabies Make Crop Circles) a group of drunken kangaroos staged an elabourate east Australian bigfoot hoax. Creating a vibrant media storm around a single photograph, the “hoax” might have evaded detection if the munted marsupials hadn’t insisted it wasn’t simply a creature of the bigfoot genome but was in fact the original bigfoot on holiday. The assertion was hammered home when the second series of photos were released in which the bigfoot can be seen eating icecream and wearing lime green hawaiian shorts and a pair of giant novelty sunglasses.

We eagerly await the release of the 3rd series of bigfoot photos in which the sasquatch puts his face through a hole in a piece of cardboard on the other side of which is painted the body of a lady in old fashion swimwear.

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

In a spectacular show of ingenuity, a young artist has proven that she has more free time than Mr. Chainsaw. The creator, Mari Kasurinen, has remodelled the always fun and yet never opposable “My Little Pony” to be more boy friendly. They sell for 330 dollars a pop and are the perfect gift for your spoilt hermaphrodite nephew…./niece.

Link for He-man, Chewbacca and many more puzzlingly wrong reimaginings.

Photo from the lovely folks over at heyokay.com.

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.