John Walker's Electronic House

A fine long weekend was spent in DC, with some work at the start, followed by a weekend spent in the excellent company of a Charity Larrison & Son (Ltd).

It was all a beautiful coincidence, as staying the weekend lowered the cost of the flights for the dev team flying me over, and Charity happened to be in town at the same time. So adventures were had.

This involved visiting DC’s central bit, replete with the Capitol Building (which looked odd, not blowing up) and Washington Monument (which must some day be used for stabbing a giant monster through the heart) dividing a strip of free museums. The buildings were remarkable, all columns and domes, no less impressive the further out you walked. The booby-prize of Most Boring Building goes to the FBI, who live in a horrid concrete block.

Brilliantly, I managed to forget my camera both days, so you’ll have to use your imaginations for what this looked like. I was incredibly handsome, so make sure to factor that in.

We visited the Spy Museum and the Museum of Natural History. The former has an blue and pink elevator, and the latter has lots of dinosaur bones, and both were well worth a look. I had an excellent ten year old guide for the Natural History, who knew where all the coolest bits were.

Of course it was necessary to have a look at the White House, which is a remarkably modest building in comparison with its surroundings. It’s still a huge mansion, but proportionally it’s a weeny outhouse to the city’s architecture. Thankfully Charity remembered her camera, as she’s not quite as spectacularly stupid as me, but was far more interested in the tree next to it.

Then the second day we went to the zoo in the pouring rain. A free zoo is a remarkable thing. You just walk in off the pavement, and then, well, you’re in the zoo. It feels like your cheating somehow. Clearly February is not a peak time for their expectation of tourism, and much was under construction, including the famed Asia Trail and its panda inhabitants. But despite this, a fair amount of animals were around for staring at, and again Charity remembered her camera.

The elephant waved at Charity, and now they are best friends.

Losing the bet, it turned out the giraffe was taller than Justin.

My mum’s favourite animal in the whole world, the Capabara, or Gigantus Guineapigus.

And finally, in a moment that can only be rivalled by those times you see Warner Bros. and Hanna-Barbera characters in the same cartoon, here is a page of Charity and John’s ART colliding. Which a special guest appearance by Brian.

Huge thank yous to Charity and Justin for a really lovely weekend. Few better people to find that “WE’RE LOST!” with.

Brian is back properly tomorrow.

There are conventions in media we become perfectly used to, despite their having no place in reality. If we watch a movie, and someone is given CPR in the street, on the beach or dangling on a rope from a hot air balloon, we know they’ll come back to life. Nevermind that CPR merely sustains things until proper medical equipment arrives – we know, and accept, that with a couple of compressions and a few puffs in the mouth, they’ll be up and about and back to shooting zombies in a couple of minutes.

I was thinking about how weird it is that in every RPG, strangers come up to your character in the street and ask you to do their personal chores. So I decided to find out what would happen if I did that to people. And the Escapist were willing to publish it.

Here’s why casinos are so great: Every time you hear some outlandish conspiratorial theory about one business or another, it’s invariably so much nonsense, but with casinos, there’s a fair chance it’s true.

Here’s why Sega Casino is not great: It’s not a casino.

The journey to Americaland is often a fraught one. Airports are filled with horrific queues, customs is terrifying, and sometimes a crazy lady will steal your bread.

It didn’t begin well. Getting on the Heathrow Express, 30 minutes late due to the train from Bath having to stop randomly all the way along because of “Mmmff mmfff mff smmfff ffmsff ffsmm,” apparently, it was then announced that no trains at all were running to Heathrow due to a suspect package. After getting halfway through the long line for a taxi, a man came out and told us all that it was running again. Walking back, the tannoy informed us, “All trains to Heathrow are suspended.” Everyone did a special walking-in-two-directions dance, until eventually magical pixies flew us there. Late, despite having allowed an unrealistic amount of time for being early, I assumed it would be crapsticks all the way. Until the lovely check-in lady, to whom I did not complain even a tiny bit, decided I deserved a ‘fasttrack’ sticker allowing me to walk past the enormous queue at check-in. Thus affording me time to buy all the various items I had resigned to living without, and arriving in time to drink half a coffee before getting on board… to a half empty plane.

A row behind where I was sat, the middle section of four seats was completely free. My plan was made. My stuff was ready. We only had to take off. Interminably we waited on the runway, painfully slowly we climbed, and then finally, finally, the fasten seatbelt light went off and I leapt gazelle like. It was perfect. No one in front, no one behind, so no one to crush me, and no one to crush with tilting chairs, and four glorious seats to myself. Sleep was possible. And welcome after the 2 hours of it the night before. Then in customs, no vast line in an un-air-conditioned chamber. Then most remarkable: rather than the usual grilling about why I would DARE to enter their precious country, the questions went like this:

How long are you here for?
What is the main purpose of your visit?
What business are you in?
When do you think the PS3 will be out?

A peculiar conversation ensued as the armed man asked me what I thought of the 360 launch titles.

However, all this good was undone when learning that Jimmy Carr presents TV programmes here as well.

Galloway’s obviously been spouting some remarkably idiotic drivel – well, his entire career, but in this instance since his emerging from the Big Brother programme – but this really says everything. From the BBC News story:

‘Asked if he had been “naive” in thinking he would be given a platform for his views, he said: “I have been accused of many things in my life but naivety is not one of them”.‘

Um.

I’m not going to play a healer again.

We, as a people, sue hospitals. The degree of stupidity necessary for such an action should be impossible to grasp, so mind-destroyingly moronic we begin whirring, buzzing and emitting smoke from our circuits. Instead, we’re used to it, even resigned to it. It is in our international character. Ask anyone who’s ever played a healer in an MMOG.

My first appearance on The Escapist is up. It’s really just a revenge piece aimed at Kieron, for having relentlessly mocked my healing abilities in almost everything he’s written for about a year.

I’ve completely re-jigged the They’re Back archive, and added another 14 months’ worth of entries.

One of them includes ish 116, which was previously missing. Ishes 96 and 97 were the terrible dark months when I didn’t write the pages. The rest of the missing dates are due to a hard drive death, and maybe one day I’ll get around to sourcing the text from somewhere.

Someone remind me this time next month to add another.

New Copyright Watch up.

12 January 1988

On Tuesdays my friend Alastair Caple and his sister Sarah come to our house for tea after school because his mum works late and so there is no one to look after him anywhere else. We used to play Ghostbusters in the garden but now we are too grown up for Ghostbusters so instead we play on my dad’s computer in the kitchen. Games we like include Outrun and Buggy Boy but best of all Bubble Bobble.

While The Onion hasn’t been essential reading for many years now, its straight review section, the AV Club, has become increasingly required.

Here, in an attempt to become the Anti-Kieron, is a link to their excellent “Least Essential Albums Of 2005” rundown, chronicling not the worst albums of the year, but the least necessary.

LEAST ESSENTIAL 2PACSPLOITATION

In a shocking lapse in his once-remarkable posthumous work ethic, Tupac Shakur somehow failed to put out a new album this year: It appears that dying in 1995 is finally starting to catch up with him. But the exploiting-Tupac’s-memory industry chugged on, releasing The Rose Vol. 2, a sequel to 2000’s The Rose That Grew From Concrete, which gave his work the tweedy poetry-recital treatment. Yes, loyal soldiers in 2Pac’s thug army can all but smell the white wine and fancy cheese as Ludacris favors listeners with a recitation of 2Pac’s middle-school-level verse, then offers his interpretation of the poem’s meaning. What’s next? Round The World/Same Song: Music Inspired By 2Pac’s Cameo In Nothing But Trouble?