Chindie

Labour have effectively been Centre Right since they went 'Third Way'. The very nature of the Third Way was effectively to become more economically right wing whilst trying to preserve some token left wing policies. They murmur about shifting left again, but they've not really done it. I think the only way you can legitimately view Labour as on the left these days is either if you're stood considerably right of centre, or wear a tie dyed so red you can't see straight anymore. Left wing parties are basically dead add mainstream endeavours in the UK. They exist only as regional focused parties, which always will have limited viability nationally, niche interest parties (Greens, in essence, even with their apparent growth I'm yet to be convinced they are gaining anything other than protests and the disenfranchised) and the token radical left. None of them have any chance of running the UK, except as part of a rainbow coalition.

Aye, it'll be awful. How anyone reads that and goes 'Great idea' I've no idea. You get to a point that you're so far removed from the source that you're basically not adapting it anymore. Dr Doom being a hacker is about the epitome of that. The blokes meant to be this supreme leader of an obscure country, half Iron Man half crazed sorcerer. He's almost an antihero at times. And now we've got a hacker. I like Toby Kebbell but if he makes that work hes a miracle worker.

I'll be spoiling my ballot as per.

The Fantastic Four are more interesting in the associated characters and events than the main characters themselves. Reed Richards is forever a supporting character in bigger story arcs, and the rest are essentially superfluous when viewed alongside their Marvel stablemates. But they have one of Marvels best villains, Dr Doom, who is as much an Avengers villain really, and Galactus too. The movie rights also threw in the Skrulls, which feature in some of the most ambitious storylines they have... I couldn't care less about the Marvel Cinematic Universe not having the Fantastic Four, but missing out on Dr Doom done properly (because so far they've consistently **** up the character) is disappointing. And Fox will just keep remaking them as there's no way they want Marvel to get the property back. Anywho... That trailer is shite. It may as well be from an Interstellar knock off for the look of everything. Against a backdrop of the leaked details (Doom being a hacker who uses the name as a pseudonym?!) this has the hallmarks of a mess.

If they announced the signing of Cleverley like that I think the sheer weight of booing and jeering would shift the whole of Villa Park a few inches from its current position. That or West Midlands police best have the riot vans nearby.

Ex Machina is a fanastically well made little sci-fi fable. And appears to be largely filmed in what appears to be a small slice of paradise.

Very much looking forward to that myself tomorrow. After Dredd, Garland can do no wrong in my eyes.

John Wick is actually a pretty good action film. The plot, that that there is, isn't anything to write home about (dangerous man goes on rampage against baddies that kill his dog, in essence), but the action is great, it creates an intriguing 'world' and and all in all makes a decent original action flick. It's not worthy film making, it's not clever, but it has no pretensions of doing so.

Metroid will still need the Wiimote.

The New 3DS has an official release date in the UK of February 13th. Nintendo also invited a bunch of people registered to Club Nintendo to buy special Ambassador editions ahead of that release date which are already going for a pretty penny on eBay.

Living on a bit of a hill, it's always only a matter of time until the comedy of errors begins when it snows... Abandoned car count currently stands at 2, and 1 bus going up the road sideways...

It's not a big story because it doesn't sell. The news has an enormous sorry fitting a narrative that popular, and easy to push, close to home, and full of eye witness accounts and footage and Hollywood-esque intrigue. Boko Haram killing an unspecified amount of people, far from here, in a continent that has become so regularly entwined in one horrific situation or another, with no/very little footage, is maybe the 3rd or 4th story on a slow news day. As it is, the news had plenty of more relevant/of interest matters to the audience to use, so this got shunned. It'll be referenced/picked up somehow in a few days when things die down in France, I'd wager, or else when something else happens involving Boko Haram in a few weeks when it's quieter. Nothing sinister IMO. Just not of media interest in the current local climate.

Theres alot of hypocrasy for sure, for example Beth Din (Jewish law) is used here for certain disputes but when Muslims want to use sharia law it gets alot of media attention and turned into 'sharia law on our streets, taking over our country blah blah. Crimes by other countries dont get as much media attention either like 50 odd civilians killed by drones in Yemen over the last month alone. Second time you've raised the beth din thing. It's news to me, if true. More information required. It's correct although I think there's room to clarify what's said. Jewish courts are in usage in the UK and have been for years, but only on civil matters, where both parties agree to it, and of course it's all completely subject to UK law anyway.

As would I. What I wouldn't struggle to take seriously is the idea that the attack against a newspaper critical of Islamic extremism is in fact an attack against the West's concept of freedom of expression. No, IMO that's the kind of thing people will read into the attack after the fact as it is analysed, perhaps. But their actual motive will be more petulant, direct, and less abstract. Attack someone that had mortally offended their apparent faith, in the aim of vengeance, and enforcing respect for their particular brand of nonsense and further instill fear generally to force that respect in the population at large.

Le Pen will be sharpening her vintage guillotine as we speak.

I would struggle to take seriously anyone who described the events in Paris today as an example of warfare between 'Islam' and the West. Murdering some innocent people at work who have done nothing but been equal opportunity satirists isn't warfare. It's murderous words removed cowardly gunning down human beings with utter barbarity.

Google 'new 3ds'. It's a new revision of the current system with some upgrades, most notably a second 'stick', which arguably should have been there since day 1, extra shoulder buttons, a better 3d system that uses eye tracking to stabilise the image, and some upgrades to the hardware generally that makes the system a little more powerful, run a little better and have better battery life. Apparently it is likely that have will be released that are 'new 3ds only'. There's not a release date for Europe yet but it's already out in Japan and Australia/New Zealand. The latter of which are PAL regions and this are basically UK machines anyway - it's quite easy to buy one from there now.

I don't know why I bother watching the Hootenanny every year. It's always shit. It's like watching a parade of things you find annoying about music. The wheeling out of 'random American soul singer from 40 years ago to sing with Jools band' has now basically become farcical.

Twice promised payrise has come in at a quarter of the level said recently. But is marginally higher than the company wide average, so apparently that's good. Still leaves me at the bottom end of one of the lowest salary bandings, in the company's own words. Mug probably is the right word.

Super Mario 3d Land is pretty much the best game on the system, and one of the best Mario games ever made.

Theres nothing personal in this, just that that post just raised an irritation I thought worth bringing up Again, I'm not an apologist or particular fan of the Hobbit films (they're fine in and of themselves as films, but have flaws and should have been better than they ultimately were), but they are the films we're discussing and provide a good basis for the point I raised. The glow around the characters Chrisp65 raises is a side effect of the use of CGI in the films. The Hobbit uses a lot of CGI, and effectively got used a bit of a tech demo in places for the director - he was messing around with various technologies (3d, higher frame rates, etc) he'd not used before in the film, and the glow is side effect of that. It's a valid criticism of the Hobbit that it uses too much CGI, and not all of it is quite up to the standard you'd hope for - it's a criticism I'd make myself. But thats a bit different to implying 'it's videogamey and therefore bad'. The bees are in the book (Beorn, the giant man who can change into a bear, keeps bees) and the film uses them as an excuse to do a bit of cinematography showing off the 3d (if you're watching in 3d). If you're not... does it really affect your viewing? Shots like this existed before 3d. The levels thing has been raised a couple of times. Laying my cards on the table I do not get this at all and it's struck me as something a critic says to back up them wanting to use 'it's like a videogame' as a criticism of a movie. The film follows the locations and settings of the book pretty accurately, and whilst it uses them for some set pieces that aren't in the book (because the book isn't trying to be a modern day family action movie - the barrel ride happens in the book but doesn't get exaggerated to the extent the director chose to) it doesn't add much that Tolkien doesn't already have there. Would you call the book videogamey? That has the same 'levels'. Would you call the original Star Wars videogamey? It has all the same 'levels' as it hops about planets, and it has the same addition of set piece action moments. How about Indiana Jones? That boulder is just like something out of Crash Bandicoot... You might argue that the set pieces are what makes it videogamey, but as Indiana Jones shows us games tend to be quite derivative when it comes to action set pieces and tend to nick things from films, and I cannot recall a single game that has anything that would come close to resembling the barrel ride scene of the Desolation of Smaug. You often see this criticism of populist blockbuster action movies these days, that they're like videogames. The implication is always that being like a game means the film is crap, and by association that games are also lowbrow crap. It's just snobbery, and it's lazy criticism. It's always used as shorthand for 'rubbish' with obviously CGI laden movies, when the use of CGI is about all that ties the mediums together. I've only ever felt any connection to a video game in a film in one particular movie, and funnily enough it's one I can't recall any critic making the connection to. It was largely, and deservedly so, critically lauded. That film was Inception. Inception brought games to mind for me in 2 respects. Firstly, it quite literally does have levels in it. It's a foundation of the films structure, that the characters pass through levels of a dream, all with their own particular features. And secondly, the entire film plays like a tutorial section of a game - every piece of dialogue in the film is discussing the rules or explaining the rules of 'the game' the film makes. And neither of these points tell you anything about the films worth or quality, except insofar as it tells you all the dialogue is exposition. Saying Inception is like a videogame doesn't critique it, it says little to nothing about it's merits. You could perhaps see me, based on my tastes, as an inverted snob. I don't like a lot of traditional art house movies, a lot of stuff you'll see on lists from people who are cineliterate (or wish to look so) (saying that art house movies are changing and I've found more to like in recent times, but for the sake of argument I refer to more traditional arty stuff - the inverse of the summer blockbuster in essence). But I wouldn't imply that the latest indie critics darling is crap because it bears more than a passing resemblance to a plot from soap with the indulgence turned up to 11, or that it has the merits of an A Level students play with melodrama out it's arse. If it's well made I can appreciate the art form even if it's not to my particular tastes - because I don't like it or don't 'get' it doesn't make it inherently bad. Take Dr Who - I don't get it, and I think there are valid criticisms of it in some ways being 'bad', but it doesn't mean it's somehow worthless as an art form or piece of entertainment. That was the irritation. 'This is made for an audience that likes 3d and videgames, so it's bad', or 'this has elements of 3d and lots of CGI, it's like a videogame, it's bad'. There is always this implication in there, belittling both the film in question and an entire cultural medium, and by association the audience for that. As said, it's snobbery that I find quite irritating. It's not valid or nuanced criticism, it brings nothing to the table but derision. As said, we're talking about the Hobbit films here and I don't think those films are particularly good - I've watched them all, I roundly enjoy them but can quite easily notice their flaws (too much CGI, a lot of it sitting somewhat uneasily in the film, too much padding, some dodgy dialogue and acting, tone problems, cinematography issues, etc etc) so I'm not saying these, or any films like them are masterpieces... but they aren't like videogames, and even if they were, that doesn't necessarily mean, as the shorthand now goes, that they are bad - it doesn't mean anything. It's just a way of deriding a movie without bothering to give some thought to it, and increasingly we see this sort of snobbish attitude and it's quite annoying (again I'm not saying that this is personally what Chrisp65 is doing but his post raised it, so to speak).

What does that actually mean? Now, I'm far from a fanboy of the Hobbit films, I think all in all the films have missed their mark and have been disappointing, especially when viewed alongside the Lord of the Rings films. I could point to flaw upon flaw in each, from difficulties with the adaptation, to pacing issues and so on. I don't believe they're bad films despite all this however. But what does 'made when 3D and computer game sales were the two big drivers of what it should look like?' critique the film for? It was shot in 3d, a lot of films are or are adapted to be shown in that format, and have shots that emphasise the artificial depth. That doesn't mean the film is flawed, however. And about the only resemblance to a computer game is they both use computer graphics. It just comes off as lazy cultural snobbery.

Or his peak at Liverpool was the anomaly. People always say Torres has never returned to form. I think this is his form. The Liverpool spell was the exception to the rule. Plenty of people predicted him to flop at Liverpool because he wasn't THAT good at Atletico Exactly this. The period were Torres was best striker in the Prem is completely out of sync with his career before that. He joined Liverpool with a record of a good, not great, striker. He's dropped further since then but he shouldn't have been expected to achieve that form indefinitely. It was a completely out of character period of success.

Very sad news. It'll be interesting to see the exact circumstances, particularly as they should having a better chance of finding something this time as they aren't scouring the entire Pacific, but between the Indonesian islands. Any bids on conspiracy bingo this time? Was there some leftovers from some secret superweapon on board? Tape of what really happened to JFK? Evidence of the connection between David Icke, Roswell, the Bay of Pigs and David Kelly?