TheFlyingGerbil

http://hint.fm/wind/ mesmerising wind map.

I have a question which is only semi-topical but this image reminded me of it. It's about the democratic race between Obama and Clinton. I know it was a big thing that a black president was elected in the US, but when he was a nominee I have a feeling in the back of my mind that the fact that Obama was black was secondary to the fact he was a man and Clinton a woman so it was not so much America was ready to embrace a black president as it wasn't ready to have a female one. I think that also plays in to the fact that Sarah Palin was very much overrepresented in the media to the point you'd think it was her running for the presidency rather than McCcain (at least that was the impression in the UK). Of course it didn't help that she came across as stupid and mental, but I can't help but feel if someone similar but male had taken her place the results could have been very different. I know this seems like American Politics but my question is in general terms and can also be applied to business. I know some countries have women in charge and so do some businesses, but they seem to need to sacrifice their feminine side (willingly or not) to get ahead and won't gain as much financially in any given position as men, and people feel safer with a male aeroplane pilot. People just seem to be more comfortable with a man in charge. So what I'm wondering is if people are more inherently sexist than racist, even if racism is more visible and does that make the sexism worse as it is more insidious.

I loved that game . There's a few of us here that like it, so you're in a safe place admitting that particular love that dare not speak it's name. In fact, I secretly hope the game Retro are working on is Starfox Adventures 2 - it would satisfy my Zelda craving as I doubt the genuine thing will make an appearance any time soon.

Online didn't hurt the Wii any, in fact, the fact it didn't really have much only gaming probably made it more profitable as there wasn't a mass of infrastructure to support. Yeah there's more mobile competition, but the 3DS hardware is profitable again already, and sells at a faster rate than the DS did, and I'm sure I don't need to tell you is streets ahead of the PS Vita. It doesn't seem like there is too large an overlap of people who aren't buying handheld consoles because they have a smartphone, that seems to be eating more into browser gaming like farmville etc. Nintendo are more financially stable than Sony. Sony loses money like a crack addict from most of it's departments so I don't see how that's helping them. and sony mobile and windows phone (which I own and love, btw) are hardly setting the world alight. I don't know how Nintendo is going to price the Wii U, but it won't be with deep losses like the 360 and PS3 if they make a loss at all Judging by the specs. I genuinely don't understand why you would think they are going to fail other than it's what everyone seems to love saying - it seems to me far more appropriate to question the long term gaming future of the other two - Sony because it doesn't look like it could run a vicar's tea party successfully and MS because I genuinely don't feel it has any loyalty to gaming - if it could sell a media box like the apple TV to provide all it's services and get as deep a market penetration as the xbox I think it would drop the hassle of the gaming side of it's living-room TV presence like a flaming bag of dog turd.

While we're moaning, I'd like to say I'm kind of disappointed they didn't bite the bullet and drop support for the wiimote without motion plus. I'm guessing the wii u will come with a wiimote plus, and for that reason hope that it will only be shovelware party games that I'm not interested in that use the standard wiimote but it's hard to get annoyed as I'm not even sure how much the wiimote will be used in general play.

from the actual quote it sounded like they tried to implement online for Pikmin, but it was unsatisfactory. Now maybe it's their fault they can't implement it in a satisfactory manner, but it is still the correct decision to not put out a game with a major broken aspect. And Dean, I'm sure you're not the only person to predict that, but you're only joining in a chorus that's been singing since the N64. THey've not got the tune right yet.

What's the album like? I just bought it but haven't had a chance to listen to it yet. I love the song with the Peter Serafinowicz video, in fact I think I may have posted it in here... In the meantime I'm listening to this: Which reminded me of a film I love. Beautiful Thing, which I'll have to watch again.

Little King's story, new and in stock for £10.85.

maybe with the pikmin running around and actually being fairly fast paced during the fights it would be more like FPS levels of data volume and speed needed and that wouldn't be possible with the hundreds of individual pikmin running around?

Next good movie you saw. for free.

awesome, thanks. I'll concentrate on levelling my assassins up.

Not sure which sort of bear you're talking about... One likes to be poked, one doesn't.

I couldn't add this to my last post as it was too many pictures. I ended up using a different card as I didn't want to push my luck. I think the universe is trying to tell me that's enough for one day:

I went a bit mental on the 2 for £10 download offer on Amazon: I think I may have got the next two for free. I got a message from my credit card company asking if my recent transactions were genuine. I said yes and didn't think any more and I ordered and downloaded them. Then I got an email from Amazon saying my payment hadn't been confirmed and they were cancelling my order. I'm not entirely sure what to do. I'm not ordering them again as I don't want to end up paying twice, plus I don't even know if my card will go through. So at the moment I have them for free and am probably not going to do anything unless Amazon pursue it. Only problem now is I want to buy the new Hot Chip album, and while I kinda want to do it in the hope I end up with another free album I don't want to end up in a mess with my credit card company. I suppose I should be grateful they're trying to protect me from fraud but so far I've had more hassle from fraud prevention than fraud itself.

I've paused FF XIII as I was getting a bit bored of it and forgot I should have gone back to Sly Cooper 3 so I've started Assassin's Creed Revelations. I'm enjoying it so far (I'm on memory sequence 3 and have done one of the Desmond ones) but I didn't like the Den Defence. I hope there aren't any more mandatory ones and I'm keeping an eye on my notoriety making it quite annoying it jumps up by a quarter when you buy a shop so you have to keep finding heralds all the time if you want to go on a renovating spree :/ I'm finding the Templar Dens with the cowards a lot harder than the other games too as they run off before I've even seen them. I did forget you're supposed to use your eagle vision to find them though so hopefully that makes it a bit easier! Overall, it's pretty similar to the other games, with, I think slightly better graphics and I prefer the city as it feels less claustrophobic than previous ones. I'm not not suffered burnout on the series yet which I think some other people where, though I am hoping ACIII will be a bit fresher.

I've got those somewhere but never got to play them before my GBA broke.

Links Awakening DX is the most obvious one, but are you just limiting yourself to the colour games? There's a wealth of classic gameboy games.

Can some help me with an entirely self-inflicted problem, please. I downloaded Chromium OS image file and used Windows Image writer to write the file to a 16GB usb drive (following the instructions here). That ended up not working (it said no OS found when I tried to boot from it) BUT that is a problem for another time as I'm not too bothered. The thing I'm worried about is now I'm back in Windows 7 the drive is only showing as 1GB, and if I right-click on it in My Computer and choose 'format...' it give the size as 1GB too. Does anyone know how I can get the full size back, please? edit: Never mind, I sorted it with the info on this page. Thanks for anyone that would have helped though edit again: though if any of you know why it may have shown up as "no OS found" when I tried to boot it, that would be awesome...

what games do you want from it?

Last year in London: Just imagine the rioters are zombies.

I think they're hoping more for the Wii style pricing than 3DS. They learned their lesson with the overpricing on the handheld. It will be more reasonable to begin with and not be reduced for a long while as happened with the Wii. I'm sure that didn't get a drop for a couple of years.

Here's a quote from Reggie: "We want to launch at a price that's going to represent an ongoing great value. If you look at the Wii, we stayed at $250 for a really long time, so we're going to give that same level of thought to Wii U. "How do we launch at a value that we're going to be able to sustain for a long time? I think people are going to be pleasantly surprised, if you will, about the way we're managing value equation." Now I know he's not saying it will be $250 dollars but I hope he's not dumb enough to mention the actual dollar price of the Wii if he knows the Wii U will be substantially higher.

Shopto.net (a large, reputable online game retailer in the UK) has Wii U console and games up for pre-order. I know for the console they will be erring on the side of caution with a high price that they can bring down later if need be but I'm sure they didn't just pluck it out of the air either. Anyway, they've got it on there for £280 (which is $430). Do you think that's reasonable, and will you be tempted at that price? Possibly more interesting though is the price of the games which range from £33 ($50) to £40 ($61). so it looks like they aren't going to be any dearer than WIi games. What's best though is that ZombieU and Assassin's Creed III are two of the £33 ones. Gotta say I'm kinda tempted... I can always cancel them if I can get them in a bundle.