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No Man's Sky has had a rather large update after months of silence. I've been playing around with it, and here's what I think so far: 1) Every single action in the game now has a lot of weight behind it, and I mean every...single...action. The first half dozen planets I spawned on before giving up were all extreme temperature / weather conditions. If you don't craft your scope quickly and *really* look in every direction before setting out, you're going to run out of life support and die. If you don't zig zag looking for the smallest outcrop of rocks overhead in order to ward off radioactive / cold / heat effects, you're going to end up exposed and die. If you make the wrong choice in terms of the elements you pursue first, you're going to die. If you stagger your last to the one single chunk of heridium on the planet so you can take off, only to realise it's a thin outcrop laid over a regular one and you fall short by like 6 units...you'r...

I recently picked up the doctor who graphic novel humble bundle  forgot to post this blog an absolute age ago, and was particularly looking forward to " The girl who loved doctor who ". The short version of the story is the doctor of the comics crosses over into our universe and is mistaken for Matt Smith,  goes to a convention and spends most of his time with a ten year old called Emma. It comes out in the wash that she's being bullied by a rather large douchecanoe, and of course we're expecting to see him get his just desserts at the end. Imagine my surprise when - spoilers - the "solution" to this problem is that Emma lures him to a nearby house and has him punch her in the face really, really hard. The idea is that the school head lives there, sees this take place and kicks him out of school. In practice, we see a really rather shocking panel of this girl getting a right old fist in the face which is totally at odds with the whimsy of the previous 3...

I realised today that it's 20 years since my tinnitus first kicked in. 20 years is a long time to put up with anything, and tinnitus is definitely at the higher end of the "what a pain in the arse" scale. What follows is a ramble about how much pain my arse is in. Uh, or something. Hi, have some tinnitus. No backsies [20 years ago title card, set to royalty free MIDI music because I'm cheap] I was going about my business when I first noticed a slight hissing in one of my ears. I didn't listen to loud music; I didn't walk around with headphones jammed on my head. Oh, that's odd, I thought to myself and decided to ignore it as it'd be gone by tomorrow. Except it wasn't gone, not the day after or the week, or indeed month / year / decade after it either. The first time I really felt the burn from my newfound companion, tinnitus - some six months after it became clear that it wasn't going away but was "sort of" okay to deal wi...

Unlike half the twenty somethings screaming about how the new Ghostbusters movie "ruins their childhood" despite not actually being around at the time the original film was showing, I can actually lay claim to being someone who went to see it first time around. Additionally, I was a child at the time and - shocker - it was the first movie I was taken to the cinema to see. I still have hugely fond memories of the trip to and from the cinema, the queue around the block, the weird black and white printed booklet sized "magazine" which was a small insert about the film and pages of local shop advertisements. The actual movie, I don't remember so much - but the moment the Librarian did her thing is deeply etched into my brain and will probably never leave. Unrelated side note, but the only other film I went to see which had the same level of festival around it on a personal level was Batman 89, except stretched over an entire Summer. Anyway, chalk me up as ano...

It's an incredible thing to strip out all the mods from Fallout 4 and have a pop at the vanilla version. The settlement stuff feels empty, deep armour customisation choices have gone out the window and those poor old Minutemen go back to being...uh...really good at hammering the same spot of wall for six hours at a time. There's no contest as to which version of FO4 wins, and modding has never been so fun - or so complicated. See, the settlement additions to the game has pretty much turned things into House Builder 2016 (or is it Hobo Simulator 2016? I forget) and brought with it a number of very specific modding complications. As a result, it's easier than ever to absolutely shatter your game and saves into a thousand non-functional pieces. I've tallied up a good 600 or so hours in the wastes of Boston, and a fair chunk of that has been rolling around in a pile of the very best mods FO4 has to offer. I'm here to guide you through the perils of a fully ...

Dealing with immigration is exhausting. It's literally exhausting. I don't mean you think you feel a bit run down or whatever - your body goes into full sensory shutdown, your muscles ache, your migraines are never ending and you develop all new forms of lethargy that you didn't previously think existed. It's just a drain, man. UK spouse visas are in the news  due to an impending tightening up, and a common opinion is "Good, they have it easy". I'm here to tell you that this couldn't be further from the truth. Below is a very condensed rundown which doesn't go into the real nitty gritty, because honestly, you'd be here all day. Setting the scene: someone in the UK wants to end up with someone from outside the EU. Ideally, they want to live in the UK. If you're from Europe and move to the UK, your spouse can be from anywhere in the World - Brazil, Africa, America, whatever. Doesn't matter. You can come to the UK from Europe w...

Hello! Today I'm giving a workshop at BSides London called The Writey Writer's Guide to Writing Writerly, and this is the temporary landing page for a shortened URL. In the near future, this will serve as a handy resource link for those who attended. Nothing to see here (yet), but there will be very soon...