Full of win

PlayTV could totally be the PS3's killer app.

If only he had a voice. Well, pen. And some paper.

Dear Dr. Breen,

I am writing to you to complain about my recent trip to City 17. I had been led to believe that the city is the closest thing there is to a capital city these days, but I must inform you that what I encountered fell severely short of my expectations.

Given the general demeanour of the citizen, I can only assume that you have been contacted regarding the somewhat strident approach to security by many of your staff. I must give praise to one Officer Calhoun who made the time to assist someone who was clearly not a local when my other requests for assistance were met with derision and, more often than not, gunfire. Even my attempts at a leisurely boating excursion were hampered not only by your employees excitable trigger-fingers but also artillery fire and air attack support.

I would also like to draw your attention to the frankly appalling levels of civic cleanliness around the streets of City 17. I could not turn a corner without being confronted by headcrabs, zombies or next-to-impassable toxic waste. And that is without even mentioning the barnacles.

Don't even get me started on the barnacles.

All in all, I am bitterly disappointed with the experience I had in City 17. I plan to spend the next leg of my vacation in Ravenholm and I do not intend to return to City 17. If I do, you may expect to feel the full force of my disappointment.

Yours,

Dr. Gordon Freeman.

PS: Good luck with the new bosses, Wallace!

Flickrdump: Another day at the office

I'm not 100% sure I actually took these pictures. Funny story, that.

It's like a cheap knock-off of Out Of Africa. Or is that Salvador?

You, the largely hypothetical reader of this weblog, may recall my recent attempts to procure a bottle of Bacardi-produced Havana Club rum while in the States. Thanks to the wonderful guys at Bramble, I finally got to taste the elusive spirit in the UK.



It's quite nasty. One of the other bartenders present said it smelled of "something someone who's not very good at cooking has burnt". One of our hosts - who has some Cuban heritage - couldn't get beyond gestures to illustrate her distaste.

The Bacardi-produced Havana Club isn't on sale in the UK. Thankfully.

New Year's End: 07 Edition

New Year's End is something I've done in my head every year. It's a collection of things that stood out for me in the past year, though not necessarily things that were created or released in that year. This year, it is also staggeringly limited given that I've genuinely been living in work.

Videogame characters I actually cared about in Uncharted
Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy
Wayne Curtis' And A Bottle of Rum: a history of the New World in ten cocktails
The first chapter of Don DeLilo's Underworld
Chuck Klosterman
The West Wing DVD marathons
Assassin's Creed's free-running mechanic
Getting caught in a nuclear explosion in Call of Duty 4
Rock, Paper, Shotgun, even though I don't do PC gaming
Vanilla & Passionfruit Cosmopolitans (thanks SJ)
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End in HD
TF2's sentry guns
And, of course, Weighted Companion Cube

Update: the hangover

There's always a problem with working in a bar over Christmas - everybody else in the whole world is on holiday, and wants to get drunk. This, fairly obviously, leads to a large number of broken bartenders and waiters come January whose employers in our specific case reward by giving them an effectively free bar for a night.

I woke up at 5 o'clock. At night. And thought it was the morning. Yesterday.