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Updated Every Weekday!

8/3/2003: Meat 'n' Greet

[Chris wrote the following to be part of last week's semi-theme week on the subject of orgasms. I put my foot down and asserted myself, as it was Space Monkey's turn and putting this up mid-week would have spoilt the whole 'weekend updater' thing. So here it is.]

This week in Greetings! Magazine, we interview three celebrities about their orgasms!

Name: Brad Pitt

NASA Orgasm Classification: Type ‘M,’ exhibiting ‘blue flare’ tendancies

Favoured Partner: Lady Jane ‘bury me in a Y-shaped coffin’ Hamilton

Closest Verbal Rendering: “oooompah”

“My orgasm and I go way back. We first met, so to speak, when the good Lady made me sit through ‘A Christian’s Guide to Things You Will Never Do,” and we’ve been good friends ever since. Actually, there’s a funny story about that; I had a psychologically-minded friend once, and he told me the ‘oooooompah’ sound of my orgasms meant that I was the sexual equivalent of a tuba-player. I asked him what exactly he meant, and he said I was ‘slow and steady, not too interesting, but had the biggest damn instrument in the band.’ (laughs) Strange, really, because when I turned away and left for the night, he went right outside and jumped in the river. Of course, some guys fished him out, but I never did get a chance to ask him about that one…”

Name: George W. Bush

NASA Orgasm Classification: Type ‘B’ (Executive)

Favoured Partner: Donald Rumsfeld

Closest Verbal Rendering: “Oil!”

“After a close examination, we at NASA have discovered that the President has been conditioned to speak as if to the press at all times, and that the President’s orgasms are the only time he expresses himself clearly. That’s why we use carefully deployed orgasms to decide most of US foreign policy. For example, shortly after September 11th, we asked Mr Rumsfeld to perform the unthinkable, and the screams of ‘Kill the bastard’ could be heard from three streets away. Then again, we recently repeated the experiment, and found that Mr Bush simply said ‘Oil,’ before falling into a coma for several days. Boy, we had a hard time passing off the fact that the leader of the free world was unconscious! I think we said he inhaled a salty snack of some sort in the end.”

Name: Pope John Paul II

ESA (European Space Agency) Orgasm Classification: ‘nice’

Favoured Partner: Unknown

Closest Verbal Rendering: “My son, all your sins are forgiven”

“How dare you make such accusations of his Holiness! Not only is he aged nearly 100 years old, but he is the leader of the Church, for Christ’s sake! Besides which, upon whom could the Pope, uh, practice? Are people expected not to notice the identity of the decagenarian in the funny white hat whom they just happen to share a room with? Honestly, if the Pope were to even consider such an idea, his only choice would be his own page boys, and I think we both know the press made a storm in a teacup out of the whole affair."

7/3/2003: Play My Damn Game

Remember that Duke Nukem 3D Total Conversion I mentioned the other week? Well, I've finished the first episode and I'm releasing it on the site. Here's the little page I made for it. If you don't own Duke 3D Atomic Edition, then I'm afraid you've been cheated out of an update. Better luck next time. As for the rest of yez: Download, play, enjoy.

6/3/2003: Amadeus Ex

There I was, minding my own business, when a mysterious stranger appeared out of nowhere and said:

"Hi Yahtzee
I've heard rumours of a deus ex movie, and it's also rumoured that the pretentious piece of crap known as eminem is to play a major role, I'm sure you can find soem rant to say about it!

Murray
England!!!!!!!!!!!!!
"

With that, 'Murray' disappeared back into the shadows before I could thank him. The encounter had shocked me for a second, but then I began applying some brain time to the concept and decided that, indeed, I could possibly find soem rant to say about it.

So, they've decided to make a Deus Ex movie. Well, I guess we might not have been able to see that coming, if we were all terminally retarded and routinely kept our heads submerged in buckets of offal. Hollywood likes a good trend following a popular film. We made the mistake of liking X-men and now we're being deluged in superhero films. And it seems someone (I'm mentioning no names here) went to see Tomb Raider just a little bit too often, and now a new cash cow has been brought out onto the Hollywood catwalk.


Here's an image from last week's Deus Ex article, so you know what I'm talking about.

Let's be honest here; the best things about Tomb Raider were either mounted on Angelina Jolie's chest or named Chris Barrie. Everything else we could do without. In fact, if the film had just been Chris Barrie with enormous tits it would have made trillions and ensured that no-one involved in the film would ever have to work again. Surely people must KNOW that. Surely they've got sufficient morals not to make more video game films when they know they aren't going to be very good. Did we learn nothing from Mario Brothers?

In a perfect world, people would make films for reasons other than profit, like, say, a desire to make quality artwork. Unfortunately, this is not a perfect world. And now they're discussing making a Deus Ex film. This idea, ladies and gentlemen, is not going to get much further off the concept stage, and I'll tell you why.

1. Deus Ex was a HUGE game with many, many hours of play. It would take a film approximately the length of Gone With The Wind to do the story justice, and even then you'd have to cut a lot of stuff. Not to mention the fact that the story twists and turns and alters occasionally in accordance with what the player does. You can't bring that across in a cinema, unless you bring back that ill-fated experiment with interactive cinema where the audience get given remote controls and vote on what should happen next.

2. Deus Ex was practically a film already. You can understand making a film about Tomb Raider because very little of the game involved the storyline. Not so with Deus Ex! The plot is built right into every aspect of the thing. A film could only be worse for not being interactive.

3. What with big black coats, sunglasses and many many guns, there are obvious comparisons with The Matrix which may prove a sticky area.

4. All the male characters would have to have identical hairdoes.

5. Deus Ex as a game is too old, as it even runs with my shitty 450 Mhz and 64Mb RAM, and by the time the film is finished no-one will care about Deus Ex.

But I'm getting off the point that the mysterious Murray obviously wanted me to rant about: the possibility that Eminem may appear in a major role. I dunno, this sounds more like an early concept idea that was accidentally leaked and will get thrown out in a matter of nanoseconds.

I've been racking my brains trying to imagine which character they have in mind for him. Gunther Hermann? Manderley? Jaime Reyes? Anna Navarre? Or maybe even JC Denton himself? Respectively, Eminem is too weedy, too young, too American, too manly and not manly enough for any of those. The only possibility I can envisage is Alex Jacobson, the geeky communications engineer, but I wouldn't exactly call that a major role. All he did in the game was make smartarsed comments in your ear, tell you off when you murder your partner, and drink unhealthy amounts of caffeinated beverage.

So I wouldn't froth too much about the possibility of Eminem in a Deus Ex film, because it seems to me there's a fairly good chance that neither is going to happen.

5/3/2003: Dream a Little Dream

I had the weirdest dream last night. And since I only woke up fifteen minutes ago, it's still fresh in my mind as I type this.

I dreamt I was on some sort of school trip. This seems to be a common theme for my nighttime adventures. Once I dreamt I was on a school trip to some castle and some girl really wanted to have sex with me. See, dreams can be a welcome breakaway from everyday life. But I digress.

In this dream, I was on this school trip with a load of my old schoolfriends and teachers, and we were visiting a museum dedicated to - brace yourselves - rain. Yes, rain. We had to wander around a sort of industrial factory kind of place full of gantries and walkways suspended over an ongoing stream of dirty water.

One of the weirdest things about the place was the layout. It was kind of like the industrial levels in Half-Life. There were moving platforms and crushy devices. You had to jump across gaps and time movements exactly right to stop yourself falling in the water. When I got to the end, there were just a few badly-put-together exhibits, like a little forest of trees made out of dustbin lids, to teach us about the wonders of rain.

At around about this point, one of my old schoolfriends who I have since lost touch with because he was a manipulative git bade me and someone else follow him back through the weird museum. We trusted that he had a plan. And indeed he did. We got to a certain point, then we all took all our clothes off and dived into the murky water. I remember at this point I or someone else said "it's a good thing this water's opaque". Because you see, otherwise people would notice our enormous willies. Fortunately, although we passed beneath many gantries on which people stood (including one of my old teachers talking to one of my current employers, for some reason), no-one noticed us.

When we reached the end of the museum, my manipulative git friend made us swim all the way back. Apparently this was part of his plan. I guess he did something important, but all we were doing was following him. We swam all the way back to our clothes and put them back on, then went through the museum in the normal, thankfully dry manner.

We finally reached a room in which a security guard sat. I think he must have tried to stop us doing whatever the hell we were doing, because I knocked him out and threw him in the water.

"Put on his uniform," said our leader.

"Fuck you, I'm not taking my clothes off again," I said.

"Just do it," said the leader with an underlying tone of menace.

Grudgingly I hoisted the security guard onto my shoulder and the three of us went into a little room with some kind of boiler up against the wall. There was plenty of space behind the boiler to squeeze in, so I did so and started to change into the security uniform. At this point, because I was wishing very fervently that no-one would come in, every single person in the building entered the room and I could only cower behind my boiler. Eventually I was changed, and passed through the crowd into the next room thankfully unrecognised in my new uniform. My leader friend noticed critically that the uniform was too small for me, but we had no time to find a tailor's because at that point the security guard came in, flanked by teachers, and stood there offering accusing glances.

"Shit," I thought. "Rumbled."

Leader and me (we had lost the third member of our party somewhere, but I don't recall him ever having an identity) ran through the museum until we reached the exhibit with all the dustbin lid trees. We noticed they became progressively taller, so we tried to use them as stairs to escape with. That was until one of our teachers came in. She didn't say anything. She just stood and watched us with an accusatory look.

And then I woke up. Pretty freaky dream, eh? It was almost as freaky as that advert for beds that depicts a hippo and a canary as a married couple.

4/3/2003: Are You Pretentious?

- Do you never admit to liking new songs because they're generally created by samey sugary pop bands thrown together by evil capitalist record producers to bleed money from the vital 8-14-year-old schoolgirl demographic?

- Do you object to wearing designer labels, and usually only wear black?

- Are there any trenchcoats, poloneck jumpers, berets or round dark glasses in your wardrobe?

- Are you prepared to pay exorbitant prices for frothy coffee beverages just so you can be seen to sit around drinking it?

- Do you never watch TV?

- Do you watch TV, but complain about it incessantly?

- Do you read obscure news journals because of a deep mistrust for mainstream newspapers?

- Do you run a website?

- Are you genuinely convinced that lots of people read your website and think it's marvellous?

- Do you try to avoid using Microsoft products?

- Do you frequent any Internet messageboards where topics on the subject of religion or politics drag on for several hundred posts?

- Would you gleefully describe yourself as an 'agnostic atheist'?

- Do you have few friends?

- Do you not care that you have few friends?

- Do you try to work dogmatic excuses into almost everything you refuse to do, eg. 'I don't want to vacuum the carpet because vacuum cleaner manufacturers are evil capitalists'?

- If the people you live with were about to go bowling and you wanted to go but were in a bad mood for some reason, would you refuse to go just so people would realise that you are in a bad mood?

- Are you a published writer, or trying to be published?

- Do you try really hard to have a negative opinion of all Hollywood films and novels by extremely popular authors?

- Is the word 'mainstream' for you a byword for 'rubbish'?

- Do you admire Neil Gaiman?

- Are you Neil Gaiman?

If you answered 'yes' to any of the above, then congratulations! You're pretentious! If not, then I'm afraid you're just a boring normal nobody. Look on the bright side, though. At least you'll never be alone.

3/3/2003: Better the Devil

Saw that funky new Daredevil movie last week, or possibly the week before. Time for us unemployed lazy bastards tends to be rather screwed up. I might not even have seen it yet, but will at some point in the future, and when I thought I saw it I was in fact seeing phantom dream images conjured by a dying brain.

However, since the film I saw seems to resemble the film lots of other people describe on the television and newspapers, I suppose I should assume I did see it and get to the mouth-shooting-off part.

So yeah, Daredevil. 'Twas a decent enough film. Ben Affleck wears red leather and beats people up. There's your standard 'beating up the school bullies' superhero origin story. It was alright. I enjoyed Spider-Man more and the latest Batman film a lot less. It was a half-decent temporary thrill. Exciting but ultimately forgettable. Let me put it this way: In a few months I'll probably be saying "I'd quite like to see Daredevil again". With Spider-man, I was saying that as soon as I was out of the cinema, and it wasn't long before I was saying "I want to BE Spider-man!"

I didn't want to be Daredevil. Being bitten by a radioactive spider is a cakewalk when you compare it to being splashed in the face with highly toxic corrosive shit and being permanently blinded. Fuck that. So, in summary, it was an OK film.

I respect the way it was unashamedly soft-science. Spider-man spent a good few minutes explaining the whole genetically engineered spider thing. Little Ben Affleck was just sprayed with a completely nondescript chemical which they never identify or refer to ever again. I'm not exactly sure why a heightened sense of touch would make you really strong and agile. I'd have thought you'd be able to feel a pea through a dozen mattresses, and that's about it. But that didn't really bother me.

That's a really cute pair of itty bitty horns you got there, Commander Gay.

A couple of things did make me wonder, though. Like that bit where that Irish fellow is attacking the rich man's car, and Daredevil intervenes, and the Irish bloke grabs Daredevil's stick and hurls it so it kills the hot chick's father. I'm OK with all that, but then the hot chick thinks Daredevil threw it, even though she was, like, ten feet away and no doubt watching the whole thing. If she wasn't paying attention to the two amazing super-powered gentleman beating each other up, she should probably receive immediate treatment for ADD.

Alright then, let's assume she does have ADD and thought Daredevil was her father's killer. She tracks him down, beats him up, stabs him, and takes his mask off. Why did she then instantly realise he was innocent when she discovered he was really her blind boyfriend? Maybe she was taught to implicitly trust anyone whose willy she has seen and operated.

A journalist who discovers Daredevil's identity but decides not to publish it for moral reasons. The less said about that the better.

But what I really want to talk about is Daredevil's stick. It's his signature weapon. A stick that can do a million billion things. It can launch a grappling hook, or be used as nunchucks, or a stabbing weapon, or anything. But then the stupid git, probably assuming too much that people won't suspect a blind bloke, goes out with it in his civilian guise and uses it as his white pokey stick. It isn't even disguised much. It's the same colour and got practically the same little symbol on it. Then he acts all surprised when the aforementioned journalist finds him out because of it.

I'm guessing the guilt he felt at beating up bad guys made him sort of half-want to reveal his superpowers. You'd think he'd want to keep a thing like that secret, but there was nothing ol' DD liked doing more than showing off his powers in public. When he's not stopping people from walking in front of cars, he's showing off his amazing fighting skills in his business suit. At one point, he brings his girlfriend up on a roof when it rains and practically tells her bare-faced that he uses sound to see with. She doesn't bat an eyelid, possibly because she's got ADD.

Also, he seemed to be able to make a designer stubble appear and disappear at the drop of a hat.

That's just fucking WEIRD.

Updates Archive

All material not otherwise credited by Ben 'Yahtzee' Croshaw
Copyright 2002 All Rights Reserved and other legal bollock language