Gaming, Music, The Internet, Whatever….

Earlier this week, the UK shit rag/newspaper The Daily Star printed a “shocking” story about how Grand Theft Auto developers Rockstar North were going to base the next version of their incredibly popular series in the sleepy Northern England town of Rothbury, scene of the recent fatal stand off between Northumbria Police and Raoul Moat.

Expect of course it wasn’t. Someone at The Star had clearly been on the Something Awful or B3ta forums and decided that someone’s mock up was a real game and ran with the story, without first bothering to do anything important like fact check. The story was pulled from the website within hours of publication but not quickly enough for Rockstar Games’ lawyers to ask the Star for an apology.

What’s most interesting about the apology (link here) is the bit at the very bottom.

The Daily Star. A "news"paper, clearly?

If ever there was a more appropriate use of punctuation, then I’d like to see it.

Boards Of Canada are renowned by fans for being a) being hugely secretive about themselves and b) their pathological refusal to do videos for their tracks.

Which while on the one hand is a bad thing, it does mean that their are some fantastic “fake” vids on YouTube. A lot of these videos contain out of copyright material with Boards tracks over the top, which given that the band themselves are named after the National Film Board Of Canada, means that there is a wonderful symmetry to the whole thing.

One of the best is this wonderful video for one of their earliest released tracks, Everything You Do Is A Balloon. It also happens to be one of their most beautiful too and I played it lots when my cat passed away last year. Thought I’d share anyway.

Paris is generally considered to be one of the most beautiful cities in the world and having just had the pleasure of a few days there, I can understand why. It’s not the first time I’ve been there but it is the first time in nearly 20 years and the first time I’ve ever been there on my own and had the pleasure of using Paris’ wonderful Metro system. Which makes London’s Underground system seem like the lap of luxury.

It may well have only been for a couple of days but with 75% of Paris being within walking distance of my hotel, getting everywhere on foot seemed like the right thing to do. The metro may well take you everywhere but you don’t get the flavour or the ambiance that you would by walking around.

There are 4 Flickr sets to look through;

First is the trip to the world famous Louvre, famous of course for having the Worlds Most Boring painting, the Mona Lisa (Pictured above, as underwhelming in this photo as in the flesh);

Second is a very sunny trip to Sacre Couer and Montmartre, famous for being the location of many french films including the ending of the seminal short film C’etait un Rendez-vouz. Though it was alot busier when I went there than in the ending of the film (embedded below). Probably didn’t smell quite so much of piss either back in 1974 (homeless people are very visible in Paris, more so than in London and New York)

C’etait un Rendezvous – Watch more Funny Videos

Thirdly, The Eiffel Tower, which shouldn’t really need any explanation and offered arguably better views than those at Montmartre;

And finally, everything else which includes one of my new favourite photos, something which someone has now dubbed Picard BC. One for the geeks/trekkies out there…

All in all, a very nice few days but much like everywhere else you need a good week to really see everything. But on the basis of this trip, would happily do so.

I’m struggling to think what the inspiration was for this weeks Mafia Wars iPhone bonus missions.

I really am….

I was just about to type that WordPress needed to do an update to it’s app to include iPad support but it appears that they released another app instead.

So, let’s see if this whole thing works shall we? Cause if it does then my productivity around here could go up quite a bit…