Good on you, friend. You stayed with her to the very end, and that is true loyalty to the last minute.

Treasure the memories, and be kind to yourself.

Out of sheer interest, is it because the data was discredited or is there an ethics issue that kills a paper once it's been cited?

There's very few people of a certain vintage who can't remember hitting their chosen difficulty, watching the screen melt effect, and listening to the opening riff of E1M1 like it was yesterday.

For what it's worth, Deep Into The Code is a banger. Civvie11's Pro Doom opening ident captured the spirit of it wonderfully.

Daikatana.

The first map was absolute mince, the colour tones were boring, the opening cinematics were long and tiresome, and even the whole first episode was a bit shit. The sidekicks were poorly coded and the last map was just a challenge map, especially with the game breaking bug at the end.

However...

The rest of the game was actually pretty good. The Greek episode was absolutely beautiful and excellently designed, the Norwegian episode was great fun and the soundtrack was wonderful, and the last episode was... decent, nothing great but nothing poor.

The patch fixed the bullshit sidekick pathfinding, the titular Daikatana made you feel like a fucking badass if you took the time to level it up, and the story was actually okay for the last three quarters of the game.

Moreover, if you like twitch multiplayer games - the multiplayer component is the closest to pure QuakeWorld I have ever experienced. Fast, unforgiving, great movement mechanics. It's got a very high skill ceiling.

Unfortunately, the opening hour or four is massively substandard and sunk the entire game - John Romero's name and the ill fated marketing campaign just made it easy fodder for people to shit on it.

Like Duke Nukem Forever, TimeShift, FEAR 2, or the Half Life expansions... it isn't amazing... but it's a competent FPS and does the job.

Was that Big Red One?

An Xbox spin off of one of the first two games?

At first, I was like "that geezer is hard as fuck, seen more shit than one dude should ever see, and is sat there totally chill"...

...and then his lad started crying and felt the complete opposite.

That poor kid has been traumatised for years and did fuck all to deserve it.

👎

My colleague's lad has randomly started telling anyone who will listen: "my mum's getting new boobies".

This lady is in fact not getting new boobies, and they're both at a loss as to why the kid has suddenly decided that, and why he has chosen to announce it.

Legend.

Even if I want to get rid of something for nothing, I'll put it up for a fiver.

The number of fucking idiots that come out of the woodwork rises exponentially when you list it for free, proper unreasonable or a ludicrous false sense of entitlement.

I'll wait until someone wants it, offers to pay, and tell them to keep it and put it in a charity box on their way home or some shit. Saves a lot of hassle.

My understanding is that it's the Rickroll of the guitar-playing world.

It's fairly straightforward for the novice to play, and is associated with the hipster who lugs a guitar everywhere as a fashion accessory rather than to develop any musical talent, where their repertoire is limited to two or three four-chord wonder songs.

In this instance, the guitarist has given the audience member the chance of a lifetime to shred in front of a crowd that most amateur band members will never see in a lifetime... and instead threw out the "so anyway here's Wonderwall" meme and dropped a simple meme song.

Happy to be corrected.

Fallout 3 gave me one of the biggest laughs I've had in years when a door was opened in an urban area, only to reveal a wall behind it with "fuck you" sprayed on it.

I bet the environment designer is still chuckling his tits off knowing that people are getting a face full of that.

edit: still got a laugh out of me

Having experienced life in a city with a heavy tourism influence, it's not the tourists that's the problem, it's counterintuitively a select few locals ripping the arse out of it.

• Housing shortages and sky high rents because homeowners and flat owners stick their places on AirBNB and other types of peer to peer services they provide access to;

• Ludicrous policies imposed on residents by locally-contracted private enterprises like event managers extending their road closures and parking suspensions a quarter mile away from their actual event areas, fucking over residents who actually live there for the other eleven months of the year;

• Zero hour contracts for those in gig economy or service workers, who get used and abused for a few weeks a year and fucked off when the good times dry up, while business owners have made bank;

• Increased pressure on public services for a few weeks a year, caused by influxes of folk putting heavy demands on the staff but leaving local residents to foot the tax bill;

• ...and the usual creep towards city centre locations trending towards tat merchants selling utter shite.

It's important to note that none of the above is anything wrong, it's just assholery for the most part...

...and then those small numbers of "locals" have the gall to blame Mr and Mrs Miggins from halfway across the globe for ruining the city. Fuck all of the way off

I was talking to my primary-school age kids about their teachers, and one of them says their next teacher will be Mr Smith.

"He's old," they said, "he must be at least fifty".

I said "nah man. Mr Smith is probably only a few years older than me, early forties I reckon".

They had me with "no he's like really old. He reads a newspaper"

Story time!

I forget the origin of the beef, but I remember a guy who grew up with another dude who was just a complete tool to my friend. It wasn't outright bullying, but general arseholery and making his life difficult when it really didn't need to be.

Anyway, my friend has a long memory and a longer grudge streak. I was finishing college at a time when print media was still king but social media was exploding in popularity.

My friend has decided "fuck this, I'm going to ruin this dude's life for a bit". He put an advert in the local paper or freeads (for non UK spuds: the freeads or classifieds is a newspaper-style private advertisements in one place - like a print version of a snapshot of Facebook Marketplace or Vinted for a local area).

Free TV. Call 07000100100 for details.

Anyone to this day knows that anything advertised for free attracts the most annoying, persistent, and unhinged type of people on earth. The freeads was published the following week. I didn't socialise with the guy on the business end of my friend's wrath on account of him being a massive cockwomble, but I understand his phone started to go wild with texts and phone calls asking about a free television - bear in mind that cheap consumer TVs weren't really a thing and a TV purchase was a "buy it for life" thing at the time, so a free TV was just an amazing deal.

It would appear the demand for a free television was too much for the guy. In true mid 2000's fashion, a social media message went up from the clearly annoyed guy, to the tune of:

Hi all, I've started to get loads of prank calls, so I've changed my number. It's 07000200200 now.

With the internet and social interactions online still in the wild west era, this was fairly common. My friend chuckled to himself. The plan worked. Not satisfied with that though, he put another advert in the following week's freeads:

Free TV. Call 07000200200 for details.

The publication date rolls around a few days later, and tens of thousands of this newspaper gets delivered to stores across the region. Obviously, mere hours after the thin yellow paper booklets are released to the public, the idiot's phone starts going banzai. Dozens of calls a day from all corners of society, relentlessly asking about collection and delivery of a television at no charge.

The guy was livid.

Livid, but not smart. He had gotten pissed off with the calls, and was unable to stop the barrage of bargain hunters hitting his digits to get a gogglebox gratis. He went back to his phone network operator and makes the appropriate changes. Not one for releasing his number in a private, carefully controlled manner - the gist of the following was posted to social media a few weeks later:

Not sure why I'm getting so many prank calls, and my mobile network are useless. My new number is 07000300300. Let me know if someone asks you for it because I'm getting annoyed.

Most normal folk wouldn't have risked being burned a third time and released their number in person or by SMS message. That said, I suspect the Venn diagram of twats like this guy who had spent an elder childhood making people's lives difficult; and those who don't appreciate the drawbacks of one-to-many communication, aren't far off a circle.

My friend sees this status update or whatever it was called back then, cuts out the reply slip of the freeads, enclosed his payment, and sends in the following for publication the following week:

Free TV. Call 07000300300 for details. Shout "camel" when I answer so I know you're genuine.

Hilarity likely ensued. My friend found immense satisfaction that the guy who tried to socially ostracise him and physically manhandle him for "fun" was now getting Guantanamo Bay levels of psychological torture, and 90% of calls that he answered started with someone hollering the name of a type of Saharan quardraped species.

The guy never posted anything after that. Not his new number, not any angry rants, nothing at all.

I respected my pal for that stunt. So much mental torture for so little effort. I lost touch with the friend but I still think of him now and then, and I hope that he still chuckles to himself with that prank under his belt, because I certainly do.

My dentist has had the nerve to add a "lateness will be charged at £1 per minute late" to the end of the reminder SMS messages... which I can understand to a certain degree, but the dentist didn't really like it when I suggested I get a discount of £1 per minute after the appointment time that the dentist called me through.

I know it's all bullshit but the double standard baffles me.

My academic institution took the more sensible approach of just making the exams open book, and adjusting the questions to demonstrate understanding and application of the concepts, rather than just recite stuff.

I dated a girl once who came round. She asked "are you going to give me the tour?"

I was like "uh, okay sure" so showed her around the living room, kitchen and back yard, before heading upstairs. I showed her the guest rooms and my room, and she sat on the bed and was like "it seems comfy in here".

Right then I did what any guy would do, stopped for a moment, and said "it sure is. Now let's head back downstairs and see what there is to watch".

It was a good couple of years later when I thought back about it and it hit me like a train, "you fucking idiot"

I'm not sure about elsewhere in the world, but daytime TV in the UK is full of programmes where people want to move house to somewhere a little nicer or chilled - whether it's to escape the rat race, bring up kids outside of a city, to retire, whatever. They have the strangest "contestants" though, like (and I'm pulling these from my arse but I doubt they're far from the truth) meeting Tarquin, 44, a part time artist; and Helena, 49, who volunteers at the local farmers market.

"Their budget is 1.2 million pounds"

what the actual fuck

I was at a wedding a few years back, on a table with a group of dudes and partners - the dudes and the groom were all housemates with me at some point for a few years. We had a riot, and it was just the typical work-drink-xbox-sleep cycle while we were young, stupid, and had few commitments.

On the tables were disposable cameras for candid selfies and daft photos - and a few were taken. As the night went on, one of the guys was eyeing it up for longer and longer - until he says "excuse me lads", picks up the camera, and fucks off to the toilet. He comes back grinning, and puts it back on the table. That started a chain of one of us picking it up, going to the bogs, and coming back two minutes later giggling.

Apparently they got developed, and the groom, the bride, and both sets of parents were going through the photos thinking they were super cute and reminiscing, until there was just a string of about fifteen photos of poorly-lit hairy ballsacks, before a return to happy and joyful photos from each table.

The bride and parents were not impressed.