Chindie

The PS4 is on the way, it's codename is Orbis. GTA5, however, will not be a launch title for it. GTA will be out in the spring, the next gen is out this time next year at the earliest, certainly that's the best bet for the next Xbox and you can assume that Sony will be fairly close behind. GTA 5 doesn't look that good, certainly not beyond the current gen, and though it will push those consoles, its a last hurrah for them rather than a early showcase for the next gen. Part of the reason PS3 deals are out there is a new revamp being out meaning Slim stocks need shifting and the need to push deals on the latest design (no doubt helped by the redesigns reduced costs) with Christmas and whatnot.

They were the better side for the entire game. Were it not for Guzan and some poor finishing, they'd have battered us and we'd have deserved it. The sending off just exacerbated things. Had we hung on and not conceded, the story of the game would have been a complete robbery.

Derren Brown's latest thing, a two parter where he supposedly convinced some bloke that he was a survivor of a apocalyptic catastrophe, had it's first part the other night. Haven't watched it, yet, but apparently it's been rumbled that the main bloke in it is a stooge, surprise surprise. I'm not sure why Derren Brown keeps doing these daft TV things - the one where he programmed a bloke to be the hero when a plane was about to crash who would step up to fly the thing was painfully obviously a complete sham that didn't at any point suspend your disbelief, and it looks like this is a further descent into shitness. Looks like, as far as his TV stuff has gone, he's well and truly jumped the shark.

We're in the relegation zone as things currently stand this afternoon. Might have to get used to it.

We're shite. Struggled hideously against a side as poor as Norwich this season. We are lucky to have gotten away with a point.

Yep. There simply isn't anything he can do with it imo - our midfield is just shit. In part it's his fault because what he's bought isn't doing it in the midfield, but I think he'd need to be a miracle worker for that midfield to go anywhere ability wise. It's just bad.

Thank **** for that. Now lets turn the game on it's head.

Relying on miraculous saves from Guzan mightn't be a great tactic, defensively. Awful.

Absolutely atrocious.

We might scramble to a draw.

Saw Skyfall last night myself. I'm a bit torn on it. It's clearly better than Quantum of Solace (which is shite) but there are things I just didn't love about it. It's a good film, I'm not sure how good of a 'Bond film' it is. It has pretty much the complete checklist of a proper Bond film covered - exotic locations, beautiful women, gadgets and some fine action, for instance - but it doesn't feel like any other Bond film. The final act doesn't feel like a Bond film at all, a complete switch in style from anything 007 has done before now if my memory serves me well. We have a fun, overblown, at times slightly daft but exhilarating all the same opening sequence that sets up a sequence of events that the film could have spent an entire film dealing with, along side the main plot that it kickstarts. But it doesn't - we deal with the fallout of that moment in a brief sequence at the beginning and then gets a few cursory mentions later on when the film decides it wants to play a bit more straight with Bond. I think the main problem is it's villain. Bardem's character just... isn't that good imo. He takes a surprisingly long time to appear, his activities until that point remote controlled. The film tosses revelations about his character aside with careless abandon - theres a particularly amateurishly clunky moment where Judy Dench in effect turns to the audience and inside 15 seconds explains his entire motivation, a little moment which amounts to 'I pissed him off, now just sit back and lets get on with things'. I never bought or cared about the character. Bardem plays him camp, unhinged, and there are moments where its brilliant - a moment in his opening scene is genuinely quite unsettling and brings out a great Bond one liner - but at other times it was just too... weird. He is much more of a straight 'baddie' than any other Bond villain, his aims are not particularly grand and, to be frank, I didn't really care about them, when it was vital that I should for such a motivation to engage me. He is also given a surprisingly ropey and sadly unnecessary bit of CGI which is used to help illustrate some of his backstory which really does not work to my mind at all. My feeling is that that is because the film throws his backstory at you with pretty much no build up, you don't have the connection to what drives him, but equally it doesn't do the Dark Knight Joker style back story of there being no back story but clearly developing his aims. An allegory might be made with someone you just met telling you their mother had died and then expecting you to be genuinely emotionally invested in the revelation - you just wouldn't be that affected by it because you've no stake in this person. The film looks stunning and it rockets along, although you might be struck afterwards by the fact that it rockets along doing not a lot. We have... a sort of Bond girl cut in 2, really, Naomi Harris in a small supporting role and then a more run of the mill Bond girl who effectively acts a pretty map and then is discarded like one too. There aren't many action sequences, the opener is probably the best in the film and sets a high water mark that it never really quite reaches again. And there are some glorious moments in it, particularly references to 50 years of Bond, a couple of which will make you chuckle or groan, and some of which you simply will not see coming. It's a shame that can't be said of some of what the film seems to want to be nice little revelations - you will guess the pay offs/conclusions to numerous characters the moment they first set foot on screen. We get Q back and it's a nice take on the character, a geeky hacker grounded in the real world, who comes to embody the theme the film has running underneath everything which it spends the entire running time bashing you over the head with, the old and the new. Honestly, you could play a game with yourself when watching counting how many references to the old and the new there were. And none of them subtle, it smacks you round the face with it again and again, a couple of them are like sledgehammers to the cranium. Q also marks a return to gadgets but even they feel almost like an afterthought. The only real gadget has such a straightforward 'trick' that you know exactly whats going to happen at some point and you know that that will be a disappointment. In actually the scene where the gadget comes into play (which is in itself fairly inconsequential) would probably have been far more interesting without the gadget, as it completely undermined any sense of tension in it, it turned the scene into rather more of a gag than anything when they might have turned it into a far more climatic tussle. I'm making out the film is pretty ropey - it really isn't. It's a good film, Craig's on decent form as his brutish, sarcastic Bond, it does a lot of things we're not really used to with a Bond film (it's a very.. British Bond film this time round), there are those great little moments you'll love and remember for some time to come, some of which could become classic Bond moments, you'll be gripped start to end and you'll even get a few laughs, there are genuinely gags in this film that fit it surprisingly well, and the cast is across the board on top form, supporting cast up - Harris and Fiennes are particularly enjoyable in smaller roles. It's just a shame that it fudges it's plot a little and subsequently makes a few missteps. I'd definitely recommend seeing it, it's a clearly quality film and I think a great many people will rank it as one of the absolute best Bond films, and I also think it will play to a crowd that doesn't like Bond because it does, clearly, feel different to any other Bond film. It feels a distance away from even Casino Royale which was itself a shift away from the Bond of old. Go see it - but maybe don't go in expecting the best Bond ever. You might get that anyway, but it's better you don't expect it... just in case.

I'm not at all optimistic. We are a feeble side at the moment, riddled with flaws and our only hope at the moment appears to be a quantum leap in the standards the team is capable of on matchday. Relegation is a very real, and at this moment in time, increasingly likely scenario week on week. Longer term, I'm not so sure. A lot could depend on the outcome this season - relegation and we're in deep, deep shit. If we manage to stay up (at the moment, we appear to be banking on luck to achieve this) I don't think we've got many glory days to come regardless. So yeah... not optimistic at all, really.

Will be looked at later, no worries.

Got up this morning, wander downstairs, get to the bottom of the stairs and ****, wet sock. Look up and the ceiling is wet, and dripping. ****. My expert eye has discovered that the drip originates from the water tank directly above the wet ceiling, but beyond that, **** knows. I've now got to remember to keep my shoes on all day and dodge the drips whenever I go upstairs.

Eva Green is just generally stunning. She also has the correct amount of crazy in her eyes to be dangerously alluring...

We'll struggle regardless of the XI chosen. Norwich aren't worldbeaters but they're a side familiar with each other and reasonably mature. They've got some fight in them. We meanwhile, are inexperienced, a side thrown together barely 2 months ago, making mistakes, and in many cases have personnel just not ready to perform on this stage. At best it's going to be a slog.

I would genuinely be a little bit happier if I were Victor Meldrew, I think.

Mancini has never been a particularly good manager.

Mark Kermode picked this as TV movie of the week on 5Live this week, and mentioned that Trump apparently hates the fact the film exists and spends a fair amount of time basically slagging off the director on Twitter. Someone had to point out to him that all he was doing was advertising the film every time he had a pop at the director for being a nobody who made a film nobody watched...

Yeah theres a pretty decent chance it genuinely was a **** up on the technical side of things. An awful lot of cinemas, particularly multiplex chains, have basically done away with projectionists and replaced them with computerised projection, to the point that it can be pretty much automated. It's not beyond the realms of doubt that, if that chain has gone completely digital, that someone **** up the schedule for that day and had the wrong film on that screen. If you go to a multiplex and the picture seems **** up, it's probably because they've gone digital which means there's not a bloke in a little room making sure the movie actually looks alright, and instead a computer is just instructing the projector to fire out a particular film. Or if they've not gone quite that far, someone might have walked into the projection room, slammed a hard drive in place that morning, then **** off for the day.

Touchscreens are still shit for a considerable amount of tasks, pretty much anything involving any degree of typing is done better away from a touch device. A touchscreen device is basically useless for producing things as opposed to consuming them, and unless you do a fair amount of arty stuff, thats probably a problem for most people. Which, given the nature of Windows 8 as some sort of chimaera between tablet and desktop, isn't terribly enticing. It might work fairly well for users of the Surface but if I want to sit down and use the thing on a PC like a normal person, knocking out some word docs, sending some emails, whatever... it looks distinctly like the experience will be slightly shitty.

...the troubles of digital projection. I saw A Scanner Darkly the other night. It has Winona Ryder in it, so obviously it starts on good footing, but I was surprised how much I enjoyed it. It's the first film I can remember involving a degree of paranoia where I found myself paranoid watching it, because at some moments I was genuinely lost as to what was going on. Looks striking as well the rotoscoped animation. Worth a watch - but really quite weird. Is a Philip K Dick novel in fairness.

I completed a information/sales course for Windows 8 a few weeks back, it's the first real in depth look at the features of Windows 8 I've had, or even just a look at how it actually works. Even in Microsofts own words I was struck by a feeling of, as a desktop user, how dumb a lot of it was. There are lots of features that to my eyes seem to be touch and gesture based inputs fudged for a mouse and keyboard. I can't recall a single one that I felt was an improvement or even just a simplification of something Windows already does. I really don't think Windows 8 is going to translate to people used to using Windows terribly well. Microsoft might have got this one very, very wrong. They'll be perfectly aware that business sales aren#t going to be enormous - it's not any different to the other times they've introduced a new OS. The problem they may have is convincing enterprises that DO look to bring in new machines or upgrade, that this OS works for them. Being honest... I don't see much that would entice me were I running a business.

The pissing about with the buses in Brum City Centre. I don't catch the bus into the centre all that much but for years I've known exactly where I can get on and get off for the various buses I'm likely to use. I had to try and get home this afternoon and I'm **** if know where anything was. And since my knowledge of street names is wank, I hadn't got a **** clue where anything was. This shouldn't piss me off because I had my phone on me so was seconds away from knowing everything I needed but **** it, I was indignant. So I went and got a taxi for sake of ease and speed and just getting me the **** home. Which also pissed me off, because the taxi had a daft sliding door I struggled to close without hurling it with intent to break some bearings, the seat creaked and cracked like it was designed to fold down and someone had bust it, the fare started at £2.20, the bloke took a slightly longer route that I use as my test of 'You're trying it on, buddy' and it ultimately cost me £16.60.

Anyone see Grand Designs last night? Eugh. Vile woman, vile house, a clear example of what happens when you've got too much money and no taste. I didn't know whether to laugh at or despise the husband. The bloke works in the city, and earns enough money to let his vile wife build that hideous palace (millions) and then clearly doesn't like any of it but doesn't give a **** because it kept her quiet. The electric obscuring glass was hilarious - a few grand a square metre, loads of it, and it never ever looks completely clear, looks horrible.