BenPaddon.co.uk

This could be the most important post-Crystal Skull tee-shirt you buy. Ignore the fact that it’s being sold from the Jump Leads tee-shirt store. Just buy it.

I love videogames, and I can’t think of a single person who doesn’t (unless we’re including Jack Thompson, but whether or not he qualifies as a person is another matter entirely). That said, I can’t help but spot glaring problems with the way the games industry works at the moment. I can’t imagine why people haven’t spotted these flaws and corrected them already, so here they are in all their splendour. There’s some unsavory language ahead, mind. You have been warned.

Let the good times roll.

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I’m in a really surreal sort of mood at the moment. I want to write, but when I load up Word the urge vanishes and no ideas come to mind, so I close it. A few moments later I feel compelled to write again so I open up Word again and nothing comes. At all. It’s irritating. Nothing is holding my attention at the moment. I can’t play any games because they bore me after a couple of minutes, I can’t draw because I get annoyed with what I’m drawing and scribble all over it, and I can’t write for the aforementioned reasons.

I feel like I need to be doing something, but when I start doing something I lose interest. What the fuck is up with me today?

Vincent came into work yesterday after spending most of the week suspiciously AWOL, bringing with him one simple command: “Look in the freezer.” A short walk to the kitchen later, opening the freezer revealed… well, nothing. That is, until Vincent put his hand in and pulled out a nondescript plastic bag. He handed it to me, and I immediately knew what the contents were. I peeled away the slightly stiff packaging (arf) and inside was the Ninth Doctor, still bound and gagged. He has since been returned to his rightful triumphant position on my work desk, but there are questions which still need answering.

For instance, how did Vincent know? He claims he was little more than “just the messenger,” but I’m sure he’s more than just a simple Pez Dispenser*. I might even be inclined to say that he’s the mastermind behind the entire thing.

I shall keep you all informed.

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* “Pez Dispenser” is a term I coined to describe any sort of job which adds an unnecessary component to a workflow. The thinking behind the term is this: Pez, those horrible yet somehow enticing fruit-flavoured candies, generally come with those horrible plastic dispensers in the shape of a cartoon character. The candy goes in and they can be dispensed by pulling the head back (apparently teaching kids that there are sweet rewards in store for breaking peoples’ necks). The thing is, you have to spend time and effort loading the candy into the dispenser before it can be, well, dispensed. It’s quicker, easier, and less of a chore to just eat the fucking candy and skip the dispenser altogether.

The Doctor lives. The organization responsible for the kidnapping have sent me this video and demand that I post it on my site if I wish to see the action figure again.

I have to say, I’m surprised that they were able to get Talking-To-His-Daughter-While-Drunk David Hasselhoff to participate.

Went to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull last night and absolutely loved it, but checking my email this morning was a haunting experience.

Those of you who follow by Twitter feed will know that I got into work on Monday and found one of my Doctor Who action figures had been, for want of a better work, kidnapped. This morning I received a strange missive from someone referring to themselves only as “¢”. The message reads:

Mr. Paddon -
Sometimes we must separate friendship with business. My long time associates are not pleased with the riff raft you have been bring into the office. They feel that the element you bring to your desk harms the true purpose of promotional dolls and detracts from the true meaning of toys. Or at least that is what i gather, they are not the most comprehendible people I have worked with.
I am merly acting as a messaganger between your sect and the sect I represent. I personally asked for this assignment to protect the over all integerty of stealling workmakes toys. I am not activly envolved in the demands, negotiations, or selection of victims. I am merely a go between. The only set condition I have for you is I merly be refered to as ¢.

Here is the first picture and statement from the toys for america liberation front.
“Ben Paddon, you are no longer in control of your twitter. If you want to see the proof of life video and see your presicous doctor, you will put the following phrase on your Twitter Blog ever hour for the entire work day of Thursday, May 22, 2008.”
“The Sky is Falling”
At 5 pm, if conditions are met you will see your Doctor on Video. For now, here is a picture.

¢

This is naturally a very strange scenario to find myself in. I have a policy of not negotiating with terrorists, but I must confess I find myself conflicted here. If anyone can offer advice, I’m all ears.

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* An alternative title for this post would be “We don’t negotiate with Twitterists”

Euan has “redubbed” the latest PvP strip. I’ve posted it up over on SkyScraper, our collaborative writing blog. Enjoy!

Click to embiggen. It looks spectacular.

This boxset is going to have all 14 episodes, all of the special features from the Special Edition boxset that was released in the UK in 2005, and also:

• New exclusive commentary with director Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, Jessica Hynes (nee Stevenson) and guests Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, Bill Hader, Matt Stone, Patton Oswalt and Diablo Cody.
• Exclusive Spaced On Stage reunion Q&A recorded at the National Film Theatre, London in October 2007.

Exciting or what, eh campers? Fun Fact: This will be the third time I’ve bought a “complete” Spaced Boxset. I bought the UK edition twice - I got it when Amy and I broke up, but she then asked to “borrow” it and decided to keep it instead.

Is anyone else playing that new map pack for Portal based on the 2D Flash version? Because I’m stuck here (click to embiggen)…

I’m fairly confident that this particular room is impossible. Impossible, I say.

I know, it’s not the best title. But I needed something vaguely footer-related.

Anyway.

A quick scroll to the bottom of the page will reveal absolutely no links to anything ever. This is because Vincent, in all his splendor, “fixed” it. Nifty or what? An interesting point is that the footer code for the skin contains this little message:

/* WARNING: This file is protected by copyright law. To reverse engineer or decode this file is strictly prohibited. */

Good thing we did neither, then. No, Vince’s solution was far more creative.

Edit: I forgot to implement Andrew’s Turing Test in the new skin, so people couldn’t leave comments. This has now been fixed.

The new skin is alive and kicking, save for some horrible links embedded into the footer of the site using some kind of voodoo magic. A co-worker and I will be ripping the crap out of ‘em tomorrow.

This evening my Dad, Stepmom and I drove over to Ikea (by way of a British pub in Burbank named the Buchanan Arms, which was quite nice despite the fish not quite meeting the standards set by the Robin Hood) where I bought myself a shelving unit for my ever-growing collection of DVDs, books and vidjagames. I was fast running out of space on my current shelving unit, which is more or less the size of a termite’s intestinal tract, so I decided I shell out the dosh on a fairly non-crap sized thing to put my shit on.

I could talk to you about how much of a pain in the arse it was to put the unit together (in short: surprisingly easy, although I had to move it out of my room and into the kitchen to slide the back on… hang on, that wasn’t quite as short as I was aiming for) but instead I’m going to talk to you about Bob Marley. “My,” I hear you say, “That’s quite a tangent even for you, Ben.” But stay with me, because it is loosely connected to our excursion to Ikea.

Whilst in Ikea looking at lighting (because the desk in the office isn’t quite as well-lit as it could be, and in the interest of not causing our retinas to dissolve into a fine paste we were on the look-out for some nice desk lamps) I spotted a guy with dreadlocks. I was ill and my brain wasn’t quite functioning properly and so mentally I made a rather childish observation - “Hey, that guy looks like Bob Marley.” I spent the rest of the walk through Ikea with “No Woman No Cry” stuck in my head, and rather oddly it was (I think) playing on the in-store PA system as I was going through the Check Out. So, not twelve minutes ago, I bought “Legend” on iTunes. I also looked up the guy on Wikipedia (the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit) and discovered he died of Toe Cancer.

I’m not kidding. The guy had melanoma on the big toe on his right foot, and chose not to have the thing amputated because it was against his religious beliefs as a Rasta. The cancer spread throughout his body until it reached the terminal stage, and even then he refused to draw up a will because to do so would bely the Rastafari belief that death is not an inevitability*. I’d spent a long time believing that Bob Marley had been shot at a concert for being too much of a hippie or some such thing. But refusal to let someone lop his toe off? Seems a little silly to me. The guy could still be knocking out cracking tunes today if he was willing to part ways with the big spud on his right meatslab.

Oh well. Not much that can be done about it now, is there?

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*a belief no doubt concocted to ease the process of tax evasion. Actually that was a joke.