Paperghost.com

I'll soon be playing a game of "Will all my pictures vanish", seeing as they're hosted on Posterous and said service is throwing itself off a cliff come April. Unfortunately Posterous quickly went downhill after Twitter took over, with server outages, lost data , a blog interface that would frequently time out WHILE STILL TYPING then place the blog entry into a sort of dead zone should you be brave enough to still hit publish. I reckon by a conservative estimate it'll take me the best part of the rest of my lifetime to reupload all the images should all the plugs be pulled, so hopefully Twitter / Posterous / whoever at least recognises that hundreds of thousands of blogs left pictureless is probably going to cause a bit of a grumpstorm. Let's not dwell too much on the horrific UI redesigns with mystery meat icons all over the place (that began even before Twitter grabbed them - though they certainly never made any progress with regards fixing it), baffli...

Move along, nothing to see here (actually there is, Posterous is being turned off in April so I'm making sure posts here reflect elsewhere. It's all very complicated and moderately annoying).

My favourite five games of 2012. Why five? Don't know. In order? Not really. More questions? Probably not. 1) Sleeping Dogs . If you've dabbled in the wonders of Hong Kong for any length of time (or China in general) you'll have had a whale of a time with Sleeping Dogs. The acting was top rate, and though they didn't push the policeman / triad schism far enough it still did enough to be one of my entries here. Shame the DLC looks to be the all too common "cheap pricepoint and little content" so beloved of most games around these days. Fighting tournaments and "spooky" Halloween events? Bleh. You have a rock solid storyline to flesh out, guys. Don't waste it. After a wonderful experience on console, this game almost soured me completely due to the infamous hkshop.exe error on PC (go Google it, then weep). In fact, this sounds more like a rant about things I hate than "my top games" so I'll shut up now.   2) FTL . A powerh...

I really enjoyed Skyfall, but some things bugged the hell out of me - not least of which, how two movies on the gritty realism of Casino Royale has been replaced by the gritty realism of Moonraker. In no particular order, a list of things: 1) The Daniel Craig comedy run, currently vying for a photo finish with Tom Cruise for the Gold Medal in STOP RUNNING LIKE THAT. 2) Somehow Mr Blond Wig manages to drop an entirely empty train (not counting the driver) through a hole in the Underground in the middle of rush hour. Haha, yeah good luck with that. If the shot was too tricky to pull off, just angle it so you can't see inside the carriages for crying out loud. I at least wanted to see some people going aaaaaaargh or whatever. 3) Bond has this horribly messed up arm / shoulder thing going on, so he decides the best course of pursuit is to hang from the bottom of an elevator that goes up what looks like a six mile long shaft. Also, he couldn't have had any way of knowing ...

Click to Enlarge Don't click random links asking about profile pictures in Skype - if you end up with a zipfile, you can be sure that the best course of action is to simply delete it. Running the file inside will lock your data with a piece of Ransomware and you'll also have a ton of clickfraud activity taking place in the background to contend with.

Here are my FTL protips (buyer beware, I've died horribly on the seventh wave every single time so maybe I'm not the right guy for the Protip job). Having said that: 1) Comb as much of the first map as possible, because you won't be able to hang about on later sections of the game. At this point, the enemy ships chasing you are fairly weak and you can afford to get caught by them once or twice as you forage near the exit. 2) For the first few levels, passing through a red area isn't quite as bad as it seems. It's worth passing through them if taking the "safer" route means you'll end up in a bunch of nebula sections which almost always mean instadeath later on in the game. 3) When upgrading the ship, a lot of players start powering down the medbay because other bits of the ship need to be up and running (you know, like oxygen and guns or whatever). Don't neglect the medbay! It'll stop you getting dead (important) and you can also use...

Below is a scattershot list of things I did and didn't do, some of which paid off and some of which were incredibly stupid. It's not a complete list, but it's a decent slice of things I've discovered from bouncing around the place. Some of it may be useful to you; if none of it is, then I am a terrible human being but I still won't be all sweaty when I get off the second plane after eighteen hours. So there's that. 1)  Getting where I need to be the day before. If a company is sending you somewhere for something, acknowledge the fact that you're no use to anybody looking a mess and smelling of aeroplane sweat. Turn up a couple of days before whatever it is you need to do. If someone is paying for the flight, it's going to cost the same whether you're there for two days or twenty. By the same token... 2)  When whatever it is that you went there for is done, leave. Abandon ship. Get out of town. You don't need a few days to wind down or see...