Mr W Phallus

It's not quite as bad as rejecting to watch foreign films outright, but it does annoy me that my parents will choose to watch a bad english dub over reading subtitles. Mind you I should probably just stop trying to make them appreciate anime. XD

So you've read the book? Sorry, but it's going to be "shot by shot" with the near-same dialogue when it's the exact same source material. Anyways, I'd say it's not shot by shot at all. Different setting, different way to capture every scene, etc. :/ Since the Swedish film version cuts quite a bit out of the book, if both films are 'shot for shot' then it's definitely not just because they are taken from the same source material. And yes I have read the book. I have no doubt the original is also excellent, and I actually did look for it but could only find the american version. But since I hear the two are basically identical, I think I'll wait a bit before watching the other version. Yeh I guess watching them close together could be a bit tedious. This is why I find the American remake so offensive. Not because it is inferior, or does the material a disservice, but because it can steal attention away from the original, which is fantastic, for no reason other than to make money.

You've got to be kidding me. I don't think I've ever once met anyone here in the UK who has even heard of Time Trumpet (except from me going on about it). It's one of my favourite TV shows of all time. If you haven't come across them yet, definitely look out for Knowing Me, Knowing You, I'm Alan Partridge, The Thick Of It and The Armando Iannucci Shows. They're all written and/or produced by Armando Iannucci who is the guy behind Time Trumpet and The Day Today.

I think everyone's missing the point here. FLD you should definitely check out the Swedish film as well, the vast majority of reviews I've read say that the Swedish version is better (which isn't to say they didn't enjoy the American version), and whilst I haven't myself got round to watching Let Me In yet (it's hard not to be annoyed by the clearly cynical motives behind it being made, good film or not), I can say without a doubt that Let The Right One in is a brilliant film that deserves your attention as well.

Which British TV shows have you watched, out of interest? I've no idea what really gets exported.

Eewwwwwwwwwwww. No offence to anyone who likes the song, but for me it sounds as far from Batman as I can imagine. These songs aren't going to be in the actual game are they?

1. Type pinata. 2. Right click pinata. 3. Click piñata. Optional step 0. Download Google Chrome. But...I have Chrome and it doesn't pop up that it's spelled wrong. D: Strange. Personally then I'd google pinata and copy & paste from the wikipedia article extract... but I guess I can let you off.

Yeh get some protein in you after a work out if you want to build up your muscles. You're supposed to eat within about half an hour of exercise, otherwise your body will start digesting your own muscles for energy. Or something. Depends how intensive your work out is obviously, I'm no expert either.

Just don't come to the UK and expect words like 'swot' and 'chuffed' to be in wide usage. They're somewhat outdated.

Every other genre > Metal

You mean people have been arrested or something for taking photos? But I agree that the world has certainly lost a certain amount of naivety. On a flight to Paris recently I was sat next to a guy who was of Middle Eastern ethnicity. Throughout the flight he was acting agitated and nervous. Now I didn't really think he was a terrorist, and I knew he was almost certainly just scared of flying, but I still had that niggling thought in the back of my mind, what if he's nervous because he's smuggled a bomb on board and knows he's going to die. It sounds really stupid, and mildly racist too I suppose, but the point is before 9/11 that kind of thought wouldn't have even occurred to me (and not just because I was too young to think about that kind of thing), we can no longer just see the innocent, most likely explanation for something, the more sinister explanation is always lurking in the back of our minds; unattended baggage is a bomb threat, anyone displaying unusual behaviour in an airport is a potential terrorist and so on.

1. Type pinata. 2. Right click pinata. 3. Click piñata. Optional step 0. Download Google Chrome.

Just started playing Viva Pinata. It's kind of amazing, though trying to get ahold of my birds doesn't always work well, and trying to get anything to make babies seems really hard. I'll click one, go over to the next one, and click it, and they just don't respond. For birds you can use the shoulder buttons to cycle through all your piñatas (at least you can in Trouble In Paradise, can't remember if that was in the first game). As for mating, I know what you mean, the piñatas can be pretty temperamental. I'm presuming you've met the requirements and they actually have hearts above their heads XD.

Look, don't blame normal, intelligent people who haven't ever seen the word written down, just because George Lucas is an idiot who never learnt to spell properly and adds superfluous vowels to made up words. It's not pronounced Wookie-ee, it should be spelt Wookie. Deal. With. It.

I'd also love a new Viva Piñata game. Or actually a bunch of new Piñatas released as DLC would be good I guess. :/

America has such a huge influence on the rest of the world that the fact the US makes such big deal out of it is enough to make it a big deal across the world. Other than that, whilst it's easy to observe from a safe distance tragedies in other war-torn parts of the world, 9/11 shattered the illusion that we in the West were somehow safe from this kind of large scale violence.

I was only 9 at the time and I hardly remember it. I think they announced that it had happened in our morning assembly, I very much doubt I really grasped what was going on. It's weird how an event that has pretty much defined our times can be all but completely lost from my memory, and yet at the same time it doesn't feel like 10 years have passed since then either.

Silverfish are brilliant. Creepier than the Endermen even.

Steamboy. The film was ok, nothing special, but boy was the voice acting terrible. Whoever thought it would be a good idea to cast a Canadian/New Zealander actress as a Mancunian boy needs their head examined.

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Not quite up there with the best of Ghibli, but really good none the less. The flashback sequence in particular was brilliant. La laa la la la la la laa, la laa la la la laaa...

One alternate theory for climate change that my physics teacher (a doctor no less) told me about once was that we are simply using more and more energy, this energy is released from fuel where it is stored as chemical potential energy and by one way or another eventually becomes heat energy. It doesn't really matter what the fuel is, the more energy we use, the more heat we produce. I'm not really well enough versed in the laws of thermodynamics to give a detailed description of how it works but it always seemed more likely than the greenhouse gas theory to me. The point the teacher was making, however, was that there are a hundreds of theories as to the cause of global warming and none of them have substantial proof. It's ridiculous the extent to which everyone has latched onto the greenhouse theory as fact (a huge part of this is thanks to the media). Do you think they got purposefully got a Mr. Shine to comment on an article about the sun?

The only scene that ever made me sick was the very first Jackass movie. The paper cut thing made me vomit all over. Funny, that. I watch a movie like Antichrist and my biggest reaction was "Wow, I really feel bad for Willem Defoe. Wow, I really feel bad for this woman!" I watch a bunch of idiots give each other papercuts and I want to dig my eyes out of my skull. Yeh it's quite often the little things that you can actually imagine happening to you that get you the most - one of the scenes in Final Destination 5 involves a little screw on a balance beam, which is a lot worse than some of the more over the top moments because it can so easily happen to you. Having said that the actual gore wasn't a problem for me at all - it's the tension that precedes the gore. The moment I covered my eyes was during the laser eye surgery scene. I'm fairly squeamish about eyes, so I was squirming in my seat and peeking through my fingers, waiting for the inevitable eye mutilation, anticipating something like that scene from Un Chien Andalou. The first thing I said, as soon as the gore moment happened was 'Oh that's actually not that bad'. Same with the screw moment, the build up is what gets you, as the acrobat keeps missing the screw by a few millimetres. In Antichrist the gore is mostly unanticipated and sudden, so you don't have time to build it up in your mind as worse than it actually ends up being. My mum n sister watched it last week. Said it was hilarious. Especially the one who bends in two. Oh it is hilarious, it just does a brilliant job of building up a fuck load of tension before the actual gory punchline.