Mr W Phallus

The candyfloss falls, hand clutching tight. (Think this is the first time that staring blankly at a computer screen has actually given me inspiration) Mind blank; deadline in an hour. Mind blank; the clock marches on. (inspired by my unexpected inspiration)

If you read these together, it sounds pretty dirty. At least it does in my mind. :/

I impressed myself, to be honest. Just realised I had as many punctuation marks as I did words. Word choice is crucial, but it's not just about about choosing the right synonym, but recognising which words are superfluous to the meaning of the story and can be cut completely. It's a useful skill for anyone interested in writing, although I always end up under the word count in my essays from writing concisely.

A card ('I Love You'); discarded. It's no Hemingway, that's for sure. (Unintentional second attempt)

6,264 what exactly?

Haven't watched the film yet, if I'm going to watch a film and read the book it was adapted from I like to read the original work first. I was sceptical but I just found a 3 scene preview on the books website (and read the afterword on the Amazon books preview thing) and it's actually really enjoyable and not as corny as I was expecting it to be. Just for the sake of criticism though, there's too many stage directions for a Shakespeare play. Edit: American Psycho is briefly on hiatus while I read Maus. Maus II in fact, I finished the first book last night. Everything about the comic is so beautifully understated - form the art to the narrative - that it makes the horrific moments in history it portrays all the more poignant.

Same, I forget to mention AC1 and also Dead Rising 1 when I posted, they were both games where people tended to overlook the positives and concentrate on the flaws.

Shadowrun. As in the 360/vista FPS multiplayer one. It's one of my favourite multiplayer games of all time. Also Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts. What's not to love? It's charming, original, looks great and it is basically the vehicular version of Minecraft.

Have any of you ever read Virginia Woolf's The Waves? It's basically a entire novel of prose poetry/stream of conciousness. It's so densely packed with imagery it's insane. Personally I didn't enjoy it too much because stretching the form out for an entire novel seemed a bit too much for me but I thought it might interest you, and there is some a lot of beautiful imagery and language to be found if you can cope with it. Also great work guys!

I haven't noticed a drop in quality at all, if anything the exact opposite. I like that the newer books are more satirical than the straight-forward fantasy parodies/pastiches that he did (although they were still great).

withoutphallus I haven't been playing many games other than Minecraft recently but I'm sure I'll come crawling back to TF2 sooner or later.

Well it's a literary game so it straddles both topics really. Either way I want this story to happen.

Soooo...are we writing this story or what? If we are I have two questions: 1) Is there a limit to the amount of times we can contribute to the story? 2) Are there any restrictions on content?

Been listening to Cut Copy all day today.

Definitely a case of people confusing cuteness with immaturity. Wind Waker is much more mature than most games I've played, particularly on an emotional level. As for my favourite Zelda game...well I've only ever completed Wind Waker and Phantom Hourglass so I'm probably not the most qualified to judge, however I can say that having begun games on the original LoZ, LttP and OoT none of them drew me in as much as Wind Waker. In particular I find that the earlier you go in the series, the less direction you are given, leaving you roaming around with no clear idea of what you are supposed to be doing. OoT I found incredibly bleak and there was so much to do that I found the whole game somewhat overwhelming, I suppose for me it was too effective on those fronts. Something that I don't think has been mentioned in Wind Waker's favour yet is the music (although this a strong point of every Zelda game I have played) so feast your ears on this:

I'm impressed with that Captain America costume, it actually looks practical. And you know what, I like the new Spidey costume as well. There I said it.

I find all this talk of rebooting somewhat depressing; imagine if the actual comic books restarted from the beginning every time a new writer or artist began their run on a series. And why do we even have to see the origins of a superhero? Not having seen Batman Begins isn't going to stop you enjoying The Dark Knight. I realise that rebooting and retelling an origin story isn't necessarily the same thing but more often than not it is, it's like the people who make these films have never heard of exposition. On a completely unrelated note, with the Green Lantern film verging on the horizon the hype it's been generating has got me wanting to read some of the comics but I've never read any before and have absolutely no idea where to start. Has anyone got any recommendations?

That's the one, the title is horrible and cumbersome and a nightmare to remember in the right order. Is it a literal translation of the Japanese title because the punctuation of the Japanese title doesn't seem to fit that?

I dunno, Apocalypse Now is an epic war film but it certainly isn't monotone in terms of emotions. As for large-scale, the events portrayed in the film may be happening on a large-scale but I'm sure it will focus on a small group of people. I suppose the film was always going to be a hard sell anyway since I tend to have a low opinion of CGI-heavy action films, it just seems to me that the trailer is offering nothing more than some impressive CGI and a whole load of explosions. The design of the alien tech has a distinctive District 9 vibe without offering the unique personal angle that District 9 had. And it's not like invasion movies haven't been done to death already.

Paths of Glory - oldie but a goody.

Most of the films I'm looking forward to seeing have already been mentioned (Black Swan, Never let Me Go, True Grit) but I'm still interested in seeing how this turns out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBgT-IPKWJ4&feature=player_embedded I have no interest whatsoever in Battle: Los Angeles based on those trailers. Show me some footage that displays some emotion (other than shock/fear) and maybe I'll consider it.

I don't watch a whole lot of anime, mostly films, but I recently watched Here and There, Now and Then. It's depressing but I'd recommend it if you feel like watching something bleak but mature and touching. Seems like there's a bit of dislike for Naruto here but could someone tell me if it's worth watching the anime when I've already read (and enjoyed) the manga?

Currently reading American Pyscho by Bret Easton Ellis. Its certainly interesting but I wouldn't exactly say I'm enjoying it. It's mostly just detailed descriptions of what people are wearing, inane chatter at expensive restaurants, occasional interjected by with sex scenes or acts of horrific violence (both of which are described in uncomfortably graphic detail. I'm an English Lit. student though, so once I get back to uni I'll be reading a whole load of books for my course (the only books I can remember right now from my reading list are Frankenstein and Maus) and won't really have time to read for pleasure. I've read all the Discworld novels B) and my personal favourites are the ones that centre around the City Watch (the first is Guards, Guards). The series does go in chronological order (the order they are written in), except for a the odd one or two, but each story is self contained so it shouldn't matter too much. Probably the best thing to do is follow one storyline chronologically through the series, for example read all the City Watch books in order, or all the Death books in order. Hope that made sense.

I'd often use dickless a lot for usernames and such, including on steam, but an admin on one of the UKCS TF2 servers asked me to change it since they have a no swearing policy. I changed it to the synonymous withoutphallus simply because it amused me at the time and I liked the way it sounded, then it just kinda stuck. Why dickless? Well my real name is Richard Les. Seriously.

Pheer my laptop has been really sluggish recently. Strangely this doesn't seem to effect how games run (except maybe loading times) but everything else runs really slowly, especially opening programs and switching between programs. On a possibly related note is it normal for Google Chrome to have a lot of chrome.exe processes running? For example I have 12 running now, and I had 14 running earlier today. I only noticed the laptop running slowly after downloading Chrome fairly recently, so not sure if there's a connection there.