Cutts

Italy is very nice. I can recommend flying into Venice, taking a look around for a few days (its quite small... you can see most of it in a weekend), then hiring a car and rolling around the north down to Florence and Pisa. I've not seen Rome, but I assume it is also awesome. A lot of France is just fields for miles, but some of the cities are interesting. I like Paris a lot. The Parisians not so much, but the city itself is quite magnificent... well worth a visit. I'm quite proud of the fact that, as a child of about 7, I farted at every major French national monument in the city. As was my patriotic duty. May I recommend Amsterdam? A short 40 minute flight out of London, its ideal as a quick getaway. There are a lot of museums there, aswell as many beautiful canals and strange wobbly old buildings. The conservative government is trying to prevent tourists from entering their "cafés", but I'm pretty sure they've not had much success at that.

Lol, bad luck dude! I could've told you to avoid McD's in Britain (they're terrible) and stick to Burger King, if you really must eat some of that shit (Burger King are a lot better... not great, but better, and twice the price). There are good resteraunts about, but typically your chain-resteraunts are a bit shit. And we have a lot of chain pubs that look like independent establishments (you only realise they're a chain when you stumble into an identically furnished place in a different town, and freak out that the grandfather clock has all the same dents in it). Anyway... Tips if you find yourself in London... 1) Head down to Soho with trusted friends, and go into one of the Chinese resteraunts there. Pick one with no white people in it for a reasonably authentic experience (they'll speak no English, so you'll have to gesticulate wildly, and you'll end up with something utterly random but usually tasty. You will never discover what it actually was however, so I advise being extremely drunk. 2) Go to the Science museum (which I believe is free, with a voluntary donation at the door) and look around. Head to the Launchpad section, with all the fun stuff for small children (sciency machines with levers to pull and buttons to press) and play with it all like you're 5 years old. I recommend being extremely high. 3) Go to the Tate Modern, on mushrooms. You can get away with standing, staring at the same work for hours whilst simply laughing about nothing... and you wont get thrown out. 4) If you're there for longer than a couple of months, get an Oyster card for travel (they're quite cheap, and save you from paying the normal rates (which are about twice as much to scam the tourists)). For maximum style points, get an oyster card, carefully strip out the RFID chip and antenna and install them in a magic wand, and then Harry Potter your way through the security gates. 5) Hit up the Imperial War Museum, and take a look at some massive cannons. They also have an interesting artwork section, with lots of old political cartoons, which can be quite witty. Or they did when I went. 6) Go to a concert. There will be something you like: Most big rock bands hit London at some point on an international tour. If you're into Classical there is the Proms (which has dozens of different concerts going on over the summer), aswell as a lot of other stuff all year round. If you like a good rave, there is usually 3 or 4 good ones every weekend to choose from. 7) Go to a market. There are a lot of them about, some on specific days, others all week round. Portobello road is quite a trendy one. Covent Garden is very nice, but tends towards expensive tastes. Camden is a mix of upmarket boutiques and weird hippy stuff... inhabitted by students, ravers, punks and freaks of all varieties, you WILL be offered cannabis by greasy looking skanks! And crack. 8) Go to a football (soccer) match. Not my kind of thing, but as I understand it there are a number of good teams based in London who will be playing most weekends. The game is fast paced, and the crowds generally very boisterous, so the experience can be quite thrilling, if you're into that sort of thing. 9) Go and have a look at any of the following buildings: The Natural History Museum (designed by Alfred Waterhouse, who really knew how to make a building look magnificent, and coincidentally designed my school) Palace of Westminster (Houses of Parliament) The Royal Albert Hall (better still, see a concert in there) Thats right.... we've built ALL that shit! The whole area around the Natural History Museum is filled with really nice architecture. 10) Have a BBQ in a park. Not all parks allow it (although you'd probably get away with it anyway). London isn't quite as rainy and dreary as portrayed in the films you see... on a nice day it is simply excellent. My personal view is, Britain doesn't always do nice weather, but when it does its absolutely perfect.

Nice one... I happened to have some excellent pulled pork at a birthday BBQ last weekend, but the bugger didn't give me the secret recipe.

Just saw that YOU BROKE THE RULES video! Classic stuff! I'll look out for Lafy and ask him about it when I next see him. Thanks for the info. I'm considering trying to build a turing-complete programmable computer inside it, which is technically possible, given all the redstone circuitry. It might be a huge waste of time though.

I think that the old rumours of British food being bad stem from the 1970's when that was very true. But we're mostly over that now... Traditional British dishes are very much comfort food, but you can find pretty much any nationalities foods cooked with reasonable accuracy in most places. You can find the gourmet stuff aswell... but its much more popular to go out for an indian or a chinese, and wash it down with their respective imported lagers. Ales - yes - get involved. Theres loads of them about, with lots of ridiculous names (micro-brewerys are making a big comeback). Pimms is an excellent cocktail, particularly by the side of a river whilst observing a boat race, but can be enjoyed any time.

Its awesomely addictive. I've just finished carving my first 4 story house out of a mountain, and words cannot express just how proud of it I am. Anyway, I vaguely remember someone discussing it on the pub server at some time, but cant recall who... so I was wondering who else is playing it? Any tips? Is it any good multiplayer?

Throat singing totally kicks ass! Funny as fuck, but what an amazing sound!?

London is a lot of fun to visit, have a night out, etc. but I wouldn't want to live there as its just a bit depressing long term. I'm around the south (in Reading, pronounced Redding)... Lancaster is proper up north, and basically miles away. Its an old Roman town, if that kind of history interests you, so probably has some excavated ruins complete with cliché gift shop. And it was the capital city of one of the major houses in the Wars of the Roses (medieval civil wars), so you'll probably find some disappointingly damp old castles. Other than that, I can't tell you a lot about it it... it almost certainly has a much the same sort of night-life as any other relatively average English city: slightly dull. If you're with students they'll know the right places though.

IT Crowd: Original Pilot. US Pilot. It basically contains the same scenes from the original episode, but just not as funny.

Dunno if anyone out there likes funky Psychadelic Rock...? Its a cheesy load of massive wankery, but I love it all the same.

Please tell me I'm not the only one who wants to enter the Hazard Course Decathlon?

They made a pilot of a US version, but it got cancelled before it was even off the ground... I watched some of it, and it wasn't very funny! It has the guy who plays Jeff Winger in Community in place of the Irish guy, but still had Richard Ayoade playing Moss. Ever see any Garth Merengi's Dark Place? It has Matt Berry in, playing Dr. Sanchez. He makes full use of his ridiculous voice talent in it... including overdubbing himself. ....nicey nicey zooo zooo....

Its clearly an Englishman pretending to be a Chinaman pretending to be an Englishman. Best English accent is Matt Berry, interupting a funeral (Tits!): With a mind-reading synth keyboard (Obviously, thats bullshit...): Doing various voice overs (Bring on the trumpets!):

Sorry Mottola, but so will I. I hear you've been bought by google.

He's gone to another dimension another dimension another dimension another dimension.... RIP.

Anti-Boner PROTIP: Pick a topic which would genuinely scare you. I don't mean like "monsters under the bed", more like "some psycho killing your close familly". Then think about it, and try to visualise yourself and how you would feel after it happened. Boner goes away. (Note: this probably only works if you're not turned on by death and violence... or at least, you'll have to pick something else to generate a fear/pain response in yourself. Essentially the theory is to generate some emotion within yourself which is incompatible with your sexual arrousal.)

Bags.... or in Canada, "bags"! Lol.

I agree, it would be nice to see CCP and Microsoft get together on this one. I can't blame CCP for it; one small icelandic software developer wanting to release a niche mmo-fps game, doesn't have enough commercial pull to get Microsoft to change their policies. Equally, I don't really blame Microsoft either; behind the scenes, we don't know exactly how XBOX LIVE works, and what specification it was designed to. There might be some implementation details about LIVE which make it difficult to interop with other services (seems unlikely - I would have designed it so it can easily be made to work, and just switched off). It might aslo be that interop could be easily made to work, but would have required Microsoft to put a team on it without making them any money... its not like Dust will be a massive $60 off-the-shelf blockbuster, its going to be free to d/l. Risk vs reward, Dust doesn't really offer anything to Microsoft, which already has a shed load of other FPS games on LIVE. ... I'm gonna have to check out this DarkSouls now. Looks quite good!

Never done it (but then alcohol is quite easy to get in the UK, shrug). Some mates and I once went round the city of Oxford collecting up all the bicycles that we could find (people just leave them lying around, with only their back wheels chained to their frames) in the town center, and stacked them up into the tallest pile we could make in the middle of the road. We must have had about 50 bikes in total, but we had to stop because the cops showed up... thankfully, since it was right outside our college, we only had to run about 10 feet to the back entrance, and the cops didn't know the code, so couldn't follow us! They didn't tidy it up though, they just manuvered their car around and continued about their business. Drugs are bad, mm'kay?

Its an awesome game. Whats new in the new one?

Well, good luck to them getting Microsoft on board with XBOX-Live multiplayer platform interoperability. Microsoft are notorious arseholes about this sort of thing. XBOX live is something they control with an iron fist, meaning that all the servers (game servers, content servers, etc) for almost everything on the XBOX are run by Microsoft techs, and they don't let anyone else near them. I think they did let some developers near it once, and it was a disaster for them, so they keep the system closed up, which means no interop between XBOX and PC, or XBOX and PS3. Sony have no problems about this however, and they love the idea of mixing PS3s with PCs. This is actually why CCPs Dust 514 is only being developed for the PS3... they wanted to do PS3 and XBOX, but there was absolutely no way that Microsoft were prepared to allow their consoles to connect to the external Tranquility cluster (which is kinda the whole point of Dust), so it was squashed on the XBOX before it even began.

Yes, sorry about the floof - posting kittens isn't normally my kind of thing, but combined with dreams and hugs I couldn't resist. That kitten being tickled is just amazing!

We did this repeatedly to my friends dog. We were trying to have a BBQ and it kept wanting everyone to throw the ball, so we did the pretend to throw trick, and put the ball in a box so he wouldn't find it. We must have done the trick about 30 times in all, because the persistent fucker just kept on looking until he found another ball and came back with it.

What just happened on my screen?

This is the floofiest thing I have ever seen. http://www.youtube.com/embed/NSZwhI4HOHE Anyone got anything floofier?