Chindie

Wolverine. Completely fine, surprisingly funny and straight story goes completely snooker loopy in the last 20, stay for the mid credits sequence.

It's an entirely new console which happens to have a tablet-esque controller. It's roughly in line with the current generation consoles power wise, has backwards compatibility with the Wii and uses the Wiimote and nunchuk as well (the console can only use a single one of the tablet controllers, which has lead to a lot of asymmetrical gameplay ideas with one player on the tablet and others using wiimotes). The controller can also, in some games run the game without the need for a TV, the screen in the controller replacing the TV. Otherwise the controller works like the touchscreen on a DS. You'd be absolutely certifiable to buy one.

Yes. No. Maybe.

Sutton is nice, although don't be fooled into believing it's a universally upmarket area. I remember Sutton once being compared to Kingstanding, but where Daddy bought you a Mini rather than a Nova, and theres definitely times where that feels accurate. Anyone whos been on a night out in Sutton will know that it can definitely be a bit 'rich chav'. Saying that, it is nice, generally. There are parts that are incredibly exclusive, others which are simply expensive. You can get some very nice houses on the outskirts - I seem to remember Monmouth Drive ending up on an episode of Location Location Location. Enormous house, view of a golfcourse, nice enough area, 5 minutes from Sutton town centre and easily commutable to the city centre.

Bloody hell, and people say PC gaming is expensive. Basically just means the price of games at retail isn't going to change - £40 for a new release that isn't Fifa or COD.

Interesting. Can't say I've ever seen somebody go for 3. The first two are both very highly regarded in the own right as two very different types of film, but 3 seems to fall short to most people. Oh, while I'm here, don't even bother watching Alien Resurrection. Appalling. The best Alien film is Alien, of course, but 3 is I think a bit of an overlooked gem. It's grimier more personal film than Aliens, and while it has it's flaws theres nothing outright bad about it. The Assembly Cut makes it a genuinely good film imo. It also does the entire world a favour by killing off Newt within a minute of the film starting, and thankfully long before her mouth opened. I always get struck at just what an awesome looking piece of work it is too - some of the shots of the planet early on, all the exterior shots really, look brilliantly grim and foreboding and inhospitable, like a post industrial wasteland writ large over an apocalyptic landscape. It even gets right down into some of the design - the flares they use for lights and torches look brilliantly cobbled together with few concerns for operator health. Resurrection, meanwhile, only has a single saving grace - Winona Ryder being in it. Overwise it's a recently expelled boozy kebab consigned to celluloid for 2 hours you'll never get back. Hopeless bit of trash shot with bizarrely whacky 'Frenchness' throughout that only helps make entire thing feel like some abortive attempt at satire.

Harry Brown is the Daily Mail movie. Horrible.

I'm not saying it doesn't worry me in the slightest. Just that the possible bad influence of the uncensored internet on my kids worries me more. Protecting your children is your responsibility. The government shouldn't be attacking civil liberties wholesale to do parents jobs for them. If you have concerns about your children and net, do some research, install the appropriate safeguards, monitor their usage, put internet capable devices in family environments, or simply don't allow your children to use the net. On the wider earlier point of this being some form of conspiracy, I don't think that's overly important. There should be 2 schools of thought - either there is a conspiracy to censor the net writ large and this is the opening salvo, or this is a moronic piece of pandering legislation intending to do little other than sell David Cameron as saviour of the children from Porno-Child Porn (since they apparently the same thing) that further down the line (thanks to the much established phenomenon of power creep) may be used to install even more sinister levels of control over freedom of information. Personally, I believe the latter is more likely, as I happen to believe that governments tend to be so largely incompetent as they are such leviathan beasts made of many departments and beliefs and personalities and agendas that they'd never successfully manage to put in place any serious conspiracy as it would immediately get revealed or fall apart. Either way, however, the result is the same - our liberty is put at risk. In this case it's slightly more galling for how moronic the reasoning is, and how distastefully it's been framed ('Watched some girl on girl hardcore action? Pervert, that's just like kiddie porn'. Which of course also demeans a heinous crime). I would say I'm amazed that anyone is for this, but I can't say I am.

Some beast has bitten both my ankles and now I'm left with increasingly swollen and weak joints there, a funny little bruise-y rash and a bloody painful hobble. Never let it be said British animals are harmless, whatever bit me probably had a national insurance number, ****...

IIRC one of the most popular thoughts are that yawns are a subtle social reinforcement, effectively a 'tick', we yawn after one another to reaffirm social connections ('You and me are the same'). Dogs and cats do it when humans have because they have learnt to home in human behaviours and copy it to enamour themselves to us. Incidentally this is basically the Trivia thread...

One of the most cynically pandering, sinister moves I can recall from a government. A pointless exercise in curtailing rights, a sycophantic sucking up to misguided Victorian sensibility at best, at worst a thin of a wedge that sees all dissent chopped away, shut off and swept under a carpet. It conflates apparently watching run of the mill porn (something I would wager a significant proportion of the population has done at some point, and probably rather enjoyed) with depraved snuff porn and great white scaremonger child porn, something at once idiotic and appalling - demeaning a perfectly legal and safe pursuit with heinous criminality, and vice versa. The news has been a parade of toffee-nosed women all effectively repeating the mantra of 'Oh won't someone save the children, Mr Cameron...?', when they seem to have forgotten that looking after children is the parents agenda. A child getting his hardcore fix early is clearly suffering from morons for parents - and yet everyone else has to sign up to an inevitable deviants list (destined to leak, probably destined to have a mark up on it too) because poor little parents can't monitor their children. 'Oh but they don't understand' - I daresay parents wouldn't understand a bomb either but they wouldn't let their kids loose on it. I'm fundamentally opposed to anything that assumes choice. But this is particularly galling as it assumes choice on something that isn't illegal. And all that is before you realise that this is pointless - the measures will be worked around in seconds, almost certainly already are in truth. What a nasty little shit Cameron is, a smooth snake surrounded by parasitic reptile croneys getting fat on the countries failings, and sat opposite him a twerp surrounded by faux imagines of working class vigour surreptitiously suckling on the same failing teet. And sat in the middle a impotent slug, ignored and drying out in the heat. Oh shit, said teet, thats it we're all porned up, we'll have the ISP stasi about soon enough.

Pacific Rim is dumb enough fun that even being shown in the wrong aspect ratio didn't spoil the enjoyment.

The UK could be far worse on race - far, far worse. There is a waning but still present casual racism though, really basic 'Othering' stuff. The kind of thing you hear day in day out - that guy that cut up your grandad just isn't just an arsehole, he's a black arsehole, the family that moved in next door to our Sandra isn't just some other family they're an Asian (...or worse) family. It's more grim with first generation immigrants - by nature they tend not to overly integrate and that gives you that 2 way stand off where neither party particularly engages the other and the process of othering is just that bit easier when you don't sit down and talk to the bloke and understand he's basically the same as you are, just dressed different. I do think that is slowly fading away, hanging on in the older generation who can remember nothing but first generation immigrants, and occasionally coming down the line to younger people when family attitudes have sustained it. Ideally it wouldn't be prevalent at all, but it is... and I think if the choice is that or the more hardcore ingrained confrontational racism we see elsewhere, I think I'd take Britain as it is now.

Just catching up with the Marvel panel stuff this morning. Avengers 2 news is obviously the big reveal but interesting that word is coming out that, despite the title, it has nothing to do with the recent comic arc. Ultron as a villain is also interesting as... well... theres absolutely no set up for him yet, which they need to do if they stick to the comics as his creation is a big part of why he's such a big deal in the comics (and bearing in mind the character that creates him isn't even in the MCU yet...), and it's a character that doesn't have any wider public perception (in fairness neither does Thanos, but Thanos got the reveal at the end of the Avengers, and is probably slightly less daft). Anywho whatever happens I'm sure it'll be good. Guardians of the Galaxy caught my attention. I wasn't expecting anything to be revealed since they've only been shooting for a couple of weeks, but what was shown sounds great. They also appear to have made some smart choices already - play it for laughs, and jump in at the deep end. It's clear from the descriptions of the footage shown it's going down a less than serious route but it sounds very interesting... Cap 2 stuff sounded great as well, looks like the talk of them doing more of an espionage film was on the money, all the descriptions of the action where based around it being grittier and closer - the elevator fight sounds almost Raid like. Interesting - also interesting that they seem to binned the idea that who 'the Winter Soldier' is is going to shock anyone... Shame then that Thor 2 seems to be the runt of the litter. It's out in a couple of months yet Marvel seem to be doing **** all with it. We've had a single trailer, next to no marketing, and they barely bothered at Comic Con either. Nice to have Tom Hiddleston come out and play things up, and apparently the new footage was very well received, but it all seemed a little low key. I'm still really excited to see it but I appear to be in a minority. Oh well. Comic Con kicked off yesterday it seems! Some concept pics from Guardians (bigger version here

It's going to be inspired by Dark Knight Returns rather than an adaptation. Not sure how I feel about that. I love TDKR, but I don't see that as a particularly easy story to sell to a film audience, and as an inspiration it is ultimately a Batman story (a grim and vicious one at that), Superman is a bit part until the end of it, whereas this is playing up both immediately. Personally I've always found that DCs heroes don't sit well together too, Gotham seems to inhabit a different world to Metropolis, quite literally We'll see. I'm sure it'll be fun, and work Snyder at the helm, pretty. It's been a rather subdued comic con this week actually. Im hoping Marvel kick or into gear with news on all their upcoming stuff. And hopefully tell us what on earth they've been talking to Vin Diesel for - though apparently we need to wait till the end on the month for that...

I think I've come to the resounding conclusion that the trading card thing is horrible and daft.

They do seem to be cursed with some of the most condescendingly arrogant fans around. Whats all the more galling is I'm buggered if I know what they've got to be condescending or arrogant about. That, amongst various other things, all just adds to why they are one of the most unlikable teams in the league.

The state owned NHS blood plasma supplier was effectively sold to Bain Capital today.

I stayed at the Lazy Cow in Warwick a couple of weeks ago. If the new one is anything like that one... The food is really nice in a steakhouse kinda way and the slightly cheesy if also strangely classy décor makes the easiest talking point in the world. Stuff like a bunch of vintage milk bottles hung from the roof with filaments in as lightbulbs. Not cheap but it really is quite nice in a simplistic rustic kinda way.

Probably the best thread for this, as it'd die in the 'Birmingham is going to hell in a handcart' thread... The Indie Is it sad that that's not surprising in the slightest?

NHS sent to begin walking the green mile today.

It's not as good as Band of Brothers but still worth your time. It suffers for telling a story of the Pacific campaign from the eyes of 3 different men in different squads with different stories, so it doesn't quite have that cohesive story you got from BoB and it's single squad of friends. It's also not helped by the Pacific campaign being a far messier and complex campaign than the war in Europe was (which ultimately was at heart a push for Berlin) so you don't get that feeling of progression as the series goes on quite so starkly. But as said, it's worth your time. It takes a few episodes to get going but had some brilliant moments from the middle on.

Thanks for the offer Tony but unfortunately don't drive yet. Another thing I'm working on in the near future. Think we're leading towards Cyprus currently... Seems fairly good value for decent places that time of year.

They wouldn't need to attack his character (and even if they felt they should its not particularly relevant in this case). They knew the prosecution case was flimsy, all they had to do is make sure his story stayed straight (for the look of the thing more than anything, and even saying that his account changed anyway) and point out there simply wasn't any evidence that proves their client guilty.

They were called Boglins. Used to collect the little ones they released in packs you could buy from a news agent when I was a kid. Blimey that takes me back...