Firefly

Jesus, the trailer sure makes this look appealing!

Roll on September!

Knights of the Old Republic 2

Just finished this (playing as a Light Side character - what a wimp I am), and I have to say: Dude, where's my ending?

As far as the game itself goes, it gets Extra High Marks for the storyline and the plot - enthralling and engaging, just like the original. As far as the game itself goes - well, I resent playing a beta release. I resent the bugs, I resent the hideously unfriendly interface, and I resent the fact that a full, proper ending had been developed but had later been ruthlessly cut.

As far as the bugs go, some of the more annoying ones:

• Being teleported to a level after a plot interaction, only to find you've been teleported to the *wrong side* of an unopenable door. I needed to apply some Hot Cheats to get around that one.


• Characters swapping between being paragons of the light side, to incarnations of the dark side, and then back again - all without you doing anything.


• Saved games that fail to load three quarters of the time.


• Quests that you complete before you are 'given' them, and so cannot get the credit


• Alt-tabbing to the desktop will cause your ATI card to have a spastic fit and you'll need to reboot your computer

There are many, many more - and I'm sure some of them are even solved in the patches (not all of them are)... but still, D minus for effort.

The story is strong enough to keep you playing through the awful game, but maybe next time they could publish the plot in novel format so that we don't have to suffer this kind of shoddy release.

Pope Adolf I

It was inevitable really that Cardinal Ratzinger would be elected as the new pope. As the only candidate with a personal relationship with all of the cardinals (as Dean of the College of Cardinals), he was able to mould that support into an iron-clad assurance of his ascendance.

So, want to know a little bit of history about the man who has now been elected as the spiritual leader of over a billion catholics worldwide? Well, how about:

• He was a member of the Hitler Youth


• He fought on the side of the Nazis during WW II... he was assigned to an anti-aircraft unit that protected BMW factories. BMW, of course, made a fortune through their use of slave Jewish labour


• For twenty years, he was the head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith. If you don't recognise it, maybe you will under its previous name - the Holy Inquisition.
  

You might argue that he had no choice but to bind himself to the Nazis - he himself argues that any attempt to rebel would have been 'futile'. Of course, the many brave, admirable men and women who did rebel (and often died for their refusal to submit to the brutal reign of the Reich) stand as testimony to the fallacy of that view.

The new pope is an ultra-conservative who has ruthlessly quashed any attempt to realign the vatican with modern society. He is homophobic, and misogynist. In the 80s he cracked down on the Liberation Theology movement... he has had Vatican teachers removed from their post for teaching concepts that he personally found repellent.

Undeniably a very intelligent man - it's just a shame that intelligence has found its keenest application in the ruthless suppression of any modernising trend in the Catholic church. He has all of the right-wing orthodoxy of Pope John Paul II, but seemingly with very little of the strength of spirit that compelled the last pope to speak out against those injustices against humanity (such as the Iraq war).

Time will tell if he is as bad a choice as he seems on paper. Undoubtedly he appeals to those Catholics who feel that the church should be a rock, unyielding to external pressure. Those of us who believe the Vatican to be a misguided and dangerous anachronism have little to hope for in the coming years, except perhaps for a short and unremarkable reign - after all, Pope Benedict XVI is already 78 years old.

Funny, isn't it - cardinals seem to have an abnormally high average life-span. It seems the Lord is not over-eager for them to join him.

Best Page On The Internet

Maybe not, but this page is still damn funny.

P.S. I know all I'm doing ATM is posting links. But then, nobody is reading this so I don't feel particularly guilty.

Can you guess what it is yet?

From the coolest thing on the Intarweb, to the scariest. Click on that link, and choose 'I touch myself'.

It will give you NIGHTMARES.

Coolest Thing Ever

Wow, check this out. A home built Battlemech! Alas, the page is a babelfish translation of the original article, but check out the movie. It's pretty excellent.