I would imagine it to be surrounded by coach loads of aggressive, England shirted fuck wits, shouting half formed lager fuelled opinions at each other on topics as diverse as race relations and tits, all the while celebrating their own inherent manliness by mind-wanking about England’s 1966 World Cup win against Germany, with England played by eleven Sophie Andertons in wet vests.

Football is quite possibly the least entertaining sport on Earth (or in the Universe I should imagine). I’d rather spend an hour and a half locked under water in a steel cage with a shark that’s being relentlessly poked with sticks than go to a football match. If I could get rid of three things, wipe them out as if they had never existed, they would be football, religion and Derek Acorah.

People that like football are a feeble minded, crass, know nothing pricks who, if I had the chance, I’d brick up in Wembley before pumping it full of raw sewage. From Poland. Which would probably anger them even further. A furious tirade of abuse directed at mythical job stealers/scroungers would constitute their last words as they slowly drowned, the warm effluent burbling into their stupid, shouty lungs.

If you want to make football interesting to me you’d have to arm the goalies. I reckon that would make it pretty bloody entertaining. Each goalie would have a high powered sniper rifle and five rounds of ammunition, the only rule would be that you couldn’t snipe the other goalie. Let’s see how many ‘blistering runs at goal’ the over paid thickos that play the game would make then.

It truly is a game for the weak minded, played by the weak minded.

Only last year Sol Campbell was on the radio demanding that ‘the fans’ stopped hurling nasty abuse at him. You see, from what I could glean, Sol has been involved in some pathetic on-off transfer deal with Tottenham United and Arsenal Rangers or something, and this has upset the psychopaths from both sides.

I can only imagine it to be a bit like going on to a gaming forum and admitting to owning a PlayStation 3 and an Xbox 360 and thinking that they’re both rather good, which on the interwebs would lead to nothing more than much badly spelt abuse by teenagers with mono-mania.

In the world of the football though, this sort of thing leads to you being castrated with a pen knife in an east end boozer. Short of that, and luckily for Campbell, all this cardinal sin has lead to is ‘the fans’ subjecting him to some horrid, horrid verbal abuse.

Please. You’re playing a game that can make millionaires out of men who would have difficulty writing a shopping list, expect a few hazards son. They’re called fans, which is an abbreviated form of fanatic, which if dictionary.com is to be believed means:

fa•nat•ic (fə-nāt’ĭk)
noun. A person marked or motivated by an extreme, unreasoning enthusiasm, as for a cause.

I’d be thankful they’re only shouting abuse and not leaping on to the pitch and stabbing you in the face with screwdrivers.

Then again he earns £96,000 a week, yes that’s right folks £96,000 a week, more money than a policeman earns in three years. He should be slightly less whiny I feel, I’d bet my brain that a policeman has to put up with more shit in a day than he does.

So what if you have to hear some thick, fat bastard calling you a talentless cunt? You’re safe in the knowledge that once the game’s over you can trot off to your twelve million pound Gloucestershire pad to get sucked off by an eighteen year old with the IQ of a satsuma.

Look at it with open eyes Campbell, if it wasn’t for the people lining the sides of the football court you’d be a fucking salesman in Phones4U. Every day would be spent desperately trying to sell single mums Pay As You Go handsets on Orange, creeping back to your bedsit to eat a tin of beans, then shuffling off to bed to wank yourself to sleep through a haze of tears before having to get up and do the same thing again, six days a week.

They’re your boss, they quite literally pay your exorbitant wages. You should be rejoicing in your luck and privilege, not cluttering up my radio with your badly articulated musings on your poor little life.

Talentless bastard.

Now I do need to be clear here, I don’t collect the Gameboy, Gameboy Color, Gameboy Advance, Gameboy Advance SP, Gameboy Advance Micro or Nintendo DS. No, I collect Gameboy Pockets. It’s a subtle yet import distinction.

I’ve only got seven at the minute but of the seven three are fairly rare, which makes me happy in my own special way!

There was however something that got me thinking during that cinema trip and having just thought about it again it has rather upset me.

You see as I sat in my seat, patiently waiting for the spectacle to begin, a family came in. Quite an ordinary family, a mum, a dad and two children. As they came in they gently strolled past me to their seats at the far side of the cinema. Although trouble seemed to be brewing.

The seats were right at the far end of the row and this didn’t sit well with the kids, they wanted to be in the middle in order to get the maximum exposure to Potter’s pine like acting, unfortunately that was where I was sitting.

It was at that point that I had the thought of offering them the seats beside me. Looking back I realise that as soon as the thought formed, I panicked.

Images flooded into my mind of the dad standing up and yelling “Not my kids you fucking paedo.”, at the top of his voice at me. He’d reinforce his eloquently articulated point by repeatedly punching me in the face. Whilst he was doing this his wife would be screaming “Kill him Terry!” repeatedly and just at the point that she was just about to pass out from the exertion of her hysteria, she would spot the sweets I’d bought.

This would renew her vigour.

“He’s got sweets, he’s grooming our children! He’s a paedophile, kill him!” she would shriek. The rest of the cinema would then descend in a howling mass and deliver unto me the hoofing of a lifetime.

Of course after the crowd had, justifiably, kicked me to death and festooned the cinema with my entrails, there would be an investigation.

The police would have to break into my flat. There they would find:

• All the Harry Potter books.
• A selection of games consoles.
• An old teddy bear.
• The Wizard Of Oz on DVD.
• Bottles of Pepsi in the kitchen.

As if this were not proof enough that I was a paedophile, in a shoe box in my wardrobe they’d find photos of a small dark haired child. They would leak these to the press who would seize upon the opportunity to print them, in a desperate attempt, they would claim, to trace the child pictured. Of course they never would because they were photos of me and I’d already been stomped to death by a mob.

Following their lack of success in finding my two year old self, they would ensure the contents of my flat were slowly leaked to the press. Full colour photographs, which would be Photoshopped to enhance their sinister qualities, would accompany every article, The Sun would print the headline; “Suburban Kiddy Lure Hell Death Chamber”, the story would continue over eight pages.

They would download every photo of me they could find from the web and I would look evil in every single one of them.

That is what would have happened if I offered my seat to a child.

So in the end I just stayed in my seat and didn’t say anything.

Sad world really isn’t it.

As a rule I’m not the biggest fan of Jeff Minter’s games, but I am huge fan of his style. Living in Wales, eating curry, loving the ungulates, wandering around in the rain, going to the pub, I think you get the picture.

Part of that love stems from a time back in March 1988 when he wrote an article for Commodore Computing International that was set in the far away year of 2001, the article filled me with tingly feelings about the future and allowed my imagination to run riot. It was a fantastic piece.

So like the geek I am I’ve scanned it in for you all to read.

Jeff Minter finds tea – the drink not the smoke – mind blowing stuff, discovering fantasies of strange futures for Commodore, Atari and even HAL from 2001. What will he think of next a computer called PG?

Quarter to two in the middle of a windy Welsh night, and I have decided to leave off writing the internal-sequencer module for ‘Space II and bring you this. The Bug Which Prints Zeros Forever will just have to wait until tomorrow morning. Right now, I have just assuaged the raving dreaded Munchies with a sarnie followed by one-third of a cream-and-jam pie, and I’m just washing the lot down with a really good cup of tea. Tea. Wonderous substance.

All that is strictly beside the point, however. What I’m going to waffle about this month stems from some thinking I’ve been doing, and something I’ve been reading, too. The reading was an article about Alan Kay, the guy from Xerox who went on to Apple and there worked on the Lisa and Mac interface, you know, the pointers-and-windows stuff we all have nowadays even on the humble ‘64. It seems they had a lot of that stuff running at Xerox, back in the ‘Sixties for God’s sake, on flight-sim hardware! And here’s us thinking that Intuition’s such a brilliant hack, and how come nobody ever thought of doing it that way before – and all the groundwork was done 20 years ago! After reading that article, the thinking ensued – I fell to thinking: what have they got in the labs now? What’s cooking in the Apple labs where they’re using a flipping Cray to design the next generation of user interface?? And what would it be like to have a computer with such an interface? So I came up with the following spoof review – of a personal computer system you might buy to kick off the new millennium with – and I thought I’d lay it on you this month, instead of the usual 68000-worship…

Extract from Your Supercomputer magazine, 21/12/2001
EXCLUSIVE: PREVIEW of the Atari ‘Discovery’ computer system!..

We have been fortunate enough to be invited to the headquarters of Atari where we were shown the new Atari ‘Discovery’ machine, which should be released this month. Atari have been working on this machine since the early ‘Nineties, and now that superconducting chips and ‘processor memory’ (the logical development from the Transputer systems of late last millennium – ALL memory within a ProcMem-based system is capable of performing a variety of processing functions upon whatever it contains) are available, the design has come out of the labs at Atari and onto the streets. Well, we think Atari are going to freak a LOT of people right out with this new machine. Here’s what we saw…

(Your Supercomputer hack, Zippy the Chiphead, takes over the story)..

I got to Atari not quite knowing what to expect. Atari have been very quiet since they bought Commodore several years ago, and despite evidence of some activity in their research labs little has been known of what they were working on. After admiring the quaint little display of antique STs in the entrance lobby (did we ever really put up with pixies so large you could actually see them one at a time?) I was ushered into a large, comfortable room in which there appeared to be just a large desk and one of those amazing hydraulic chairs which look like they belong on the Star Ship Enterprise. No monitors, no disk drives, not even a fan. After a certain amount of confusion, I was assured that the desk was, in fact, the Atari Discovery computer.

At first sight the computer appears to be a large, black monolith, perhaps six inches thick, mounted on suitably high-tec legs. On sitting down to the machine you find that the whole surface can be tilted so as to be at a comfortable angle for the user. Of course, I sat down at the machine and felt a little foolish, I kept looking for the mouse and not finding one! I reached out a hand to touch the surface of the monolith, and got my first surprise: the Atari logo appeared in the middle of the smooth black surface. It looked just as if it were painted on, except for the fact that it was doing the most amazing colour-cycling. The image was startling to a computer user used to looking at monitors – even the highest- quality monitor cannot render graphics which look like they were printed images. This was my first encounter with Atari’s new display technology – the ‘screen’ is composed of millions of tiny beads which change their colour according to what image is being displayed. The beads are opaque, and if viewed by ambient light, it appears that the surface of the monolith just changes colour. It doesn’t shine, like a monitor, because unless you turn on the backlighting if it’s really dark, the colours you see come from reflected ambient light just like they would for a piece of paper. The effect is uncanny.

On the Discovery, the whole upper surface of the monolith functions as both screen and interface to the computer. When you rest your hands upon the surface of the machine, it comes to life: after the Atari logo has been displayed the monolith changes into what appears to be a fine wooden table with a couple of bits of paper lying on it. (Atari assure me that the user can configure the default desk surface to be whatever he likes, so if you favour cracked Formica instead of walnut veneer, you can have it). The surface of the monolith feels faintly resilient: in fact it is a highly-accurate touch-sensitive surface capable of distinguishing between the lightest touch and the heaviest pressure. Operating the system is totally instinctive, as I found out: just reach for one of the pieces of paper and drag it towards you, and that’s exactly what happens. You can do anything you could do with a normal piece of paper: turn it around a little so as to get a better view, slide it over or under another piece (depending on how hard you press as you slide) . . . of course you can’t make a paper aeroplane out of it, the screen is still only two-dimensional! Examining the paper, I found that it was headed, in a neat hand-written script, ‘Atari HAL operating system Version 0.9’. (The script is again user-configurable, so if you’re into Epson Dot-Matrix circa 1984 on some kind of nostalgia trip you’ll get your way).

Underneath the main heading was a list of sub-headings; running a finger down the list highlighted each in turn and – a neat touch this – increasing pressure of the finger on an item caused the whole surface of the desktop to ‘zoom in’ on the selected area. Very useful for reading the small print. Tapping an item in the list results in another piece of paper being spawned – the paper and desktop look so real that seeing another piece peel itself off is quite startling a-d weird. I generated a sheet headed ‘Demos’ from the parent sheet, and received a written list of the available demos on the system. Simultaneously, a variety of familiar objects appeared on the desktop: a pen, a paintbrush, a globe (spinning, too)
These objects can be grabbed, moved around, and tapped on in order to get them to work. There isn’t enough space here to fully describe all the demos; the highlights included such things as a WP package upon which you could write with a finger, or by ‘typing’ on a representation of a keyboard painted on the desktop, or by using an empty fountain pen upon the surface of the ‘paper’ on the desktop. There was an art package which was operated by using real paintbrushes on the desktop surface – the surface can detect even minute changes of pressure – proper painting, but with all the advantages of computer graphics.

I liked the Lightsynth program from T.E.A. (a new software company calling themselves True Electronic Art) upon which some remarkable effects are possible by using both hands and that remarkable pressure-sensitive surface. Perhaps the most fascinating program was World, a logical extension from the flight-simulator: linked to a large database of world coordinates, the user can ‘fly’ to any point on Earth at any speed and view the surroundings at any scale; of course a lot of fine detail is lost as even with gigabytes of core you cannot digitise every point on the planet, but advanced fractal techniques are used to generate detail. I went to Machu Picchu in the World simulator and found the fractal rendering of the rough Inca stonework to be quite convincing. At the moment World is empty, but the designers promise an update featuring animals and plant growth next year. The company producing World, Dave Bowman Associates, tell us that there will be a companion program, provisionally entitled God, which will allow the end-user to create new planets to explore using World. Generating a convincing planet should be possible in about a week using the new software.

I can only mention a few of the remarkable demos in my limited space here; expect proper reviews in later issues. After my ‘hands-on’ with the Discovery, I talked with the Atari bosses about marketing and pricing of the new machine. Amazingly, the whole system will only cost you #.

Extract ends, ‘Your Supercomputer’ magazine, 21/12/2001

Who knows?

Anything can happen.

Well, I think I’ll just print this out and shamble off to make myself another cup of tea. Tea. Remarkable substance….

I can’t begin to tell you how cool that was to me when I was thirteen.

Then the celebrities arrived.

The sheer volume of tweets that the likes of Jonathan Ross and Stephen Fry post is ridiculous. When you’re reading your Twitter feed on an iPhone and out of all the updates you get ninety five percent of them come from Jonathan Ross and each of those is in reply to some unseen comment, then you get really bored, really quickly.

The Twitter-shitters are one thing but at least they’re funny and/or interesting. It’s when the boring, band wagon jumpers get on board that you have to start worrying. Enter Chris Moyles self styled saviour of Radio One.

Chris Moyles is the least amusing man on the planet but, as I am certain he would point out to me, he does earn way more money than me. I’m fairly certain he’d follow that keen observation up with something about my poxy blog and lack of a breakfast radio show. I guess it’s these two things that makes him think people care about what he has to say.

His show bores me, he bores me and I’m really not interested in anything he has to say so why would I want his boorish, obnoxious musings when I’m on the move? Not only that but everytime he says twittering instead of tweeting (which he does a fair amount on the half hour monologue he does every fucking morning) he’s getting it wrong. No surprise there though is there?

The long and short of it is that I’m going off Twitter, where I was once a staunch advocate. Still I intend to keep tweeting just a little bit longer just to see what happens, I’ve removed all the celebs though, well except Stephen Fry, how could I?

Well, they’re practically indestructible aren’t they? Well, except in Terminator: Salvation where it seems like they could be taken out with a pea shooter.

The entirely inconsistent nature of damage sustained by Terminators is – ironically – the only consistent thread between all the movies and the TV series!

In The Terminator they get torn in half by grenades yet in Terminator: Salvation they can survive multiple rounds of automatic fire to the head at point blank range and rocket launchers aimed at their chests but at the same time they’re offed alarmingly quickly by two shots to the temple – one assumes this only works if they’re pinned down under a helicopter though?

Let’s take a look at the effects of molten metal shall we?

Ok. In Terminator 2 Arnie melts himself in molten steel. At the end. A quick thumbs up, gurgle, gurgle, melty melt. Yet, yet in Terminator: Salvation we see a Terminator get covered in – what we must assume to be – molten Terminator alloy and there’s not a single bit of damage.

Sure it crusts up like Magic Shell but it isn’t long before it breaks free of its crispy coating and is on the rampage again.

They’re surely not telling us that being covered in molten alloy does no damage to Terminators at all? Logically the alloy most likely has a lower melting point than steel and – given – there wasn’t a big bath of it. It was poured all over the Terminators head though? For fuck’s sake surely there’d be some damage. Surely?

Anyway, moving on from the roll of the dice Terminator coconut shy for a moment let’s move on to the physics involved in moving a Terminator around.

They’re big. Really big. At least 6″ 2′, built like brick shit houses and judging by the momentum they seem to have they must weigh at least 500 kilos if not more.

So riddle me this: how can they sit on motorbikes and ride in jeeps without any noticeable effect on the suspension of said vehicles?

In Terminator 2 a T800 is seen zooming down flood channels on a motorbike and at one point even does some sweet jumps on said bike, but never at any point does the bike crumple under the immense weight of a Terminator with a shotgun!

Similarly in Terminator:Salvation a Terminator is seen getting in to a Jeep with a couple of kids, who’d have a combined weight of around 80 kilos – if they were soaking wet – yet the Jeep neither rocks nor sways as this hulking metal monstrosity clambers in.

How?!

Look I’m as willing as the next person to suspend belief – and c’mon Christian Bale leading the human resistance – but there’s a line right? Right?

I know she’s got issues and that she a bit too keen on the drugs but hey, she’s got a fantastic musical ability and she’s as hot as you like.

Well, she was.

Bloody hell, what happened? Well, clearly a crazy amount of booze, jazz talc and crack happened but I mean why did it happen?

I wish I knew.