Falling Sky

2007! Explain Yourself!

Dunno about you, but this year has been a bloody strange one here in Castle Von Naggle.  Compared to 2006, oh-seven was a mess, with some truly awful stuff happening to people around us, two house-moves for us and a general sense of chaos tearing through the year.  The Lass has written a typically spot-on review of the year from our little corner(s) of the world, so this is more of a general stream-of-semi-consciousness from yours truly on the last twelve months.  Tune in and out, that's probably best...

Artistically this year's been all over the place, and I think I know why.  In 2006 I churned out a decent number of oil paintings (the first year I'd ever used them) plus the famous Cow Parade and Orkney sketchbooks, two of the best things I've ever done.  But this year?  The pickings have definitely been slimmer, with nowhere near enough oil paintings to justify a similar Year In Oils post.  A lot of this is down to moving house in March and, more importantly, how we felt there (clue: not good).  I never felt comfortable producing artwork in the flat we moved to, partly because the ceiling in that room was sloped and I'd usually end up slamming my head into it once a week.  Creatively I just seemed to dry up as the months went by and I got more and more depressed about where we were living - I only briefly got back on the saddle on our holiday to Skye - and it was only well into September and our next flat that I felt good about drawing and painting again.  Good thing too, with a commission to complete and a pressie to paint.  Towards the end of the year I found myself going off the life drawing sessions at Leith School of Art, so next year I'm eschewing those weekly sessions in favour of getting a year's membership to Edinburgh Zoo and popping up there to work on animal drawings.  I figure I've got enough naked people under my belt for now (er, so to speak) and it'd be good to broaden my range a bit more.  Plus, if I'm honest, I reckon animal artwork has a better chance of selling than nude pieces, and the more artwork I can sell in 2008 the better.

Ah, but where to be selling that work?  Etsy - the site I've been using since April 2006 - has become increasingly infuriating and one gets a growing sense that they're trying to encourage more sellers onto the site rather than buyers.  Communication has been patchy and it hardly bodes well when one must rely on an independent site for any Etsy information - Etsynews - rather than the oh-so-kooky Storque and the utterly useless Forum, a message board that simply cannot cope with the huge amount of posters, many of whom seem to exist in a world without capital letters or punctuation and have the typing abilities of a lolcat.  My sales on there were pretty decent for much of the year, but dropped off over the last few months, and I'm now considering whether to use jonnagl.com to set up my own online store for my artwork, or use an alternative venue like Tokarta or Dawanda.  Either way, unless there's some tangible improvement in Etsy, I'll be taking my wares elsewhere.

Music!  I've only been to one gig this year - the staggeringly brilliant Carter USM gig at the Barrowlands - though I had been due to see the mighty Mastodon in Glasgow, my plans were scuppered by a train strike.  Tsk!  Still, there's been a huge number of cracking albums this year and hopefully I'll get a proper review post knocked out in the next few days.  The best?  At the risk of being predictable, it's a toss-up between Melt Banana's psychojoyous Bambi's Dilemma and Radiohead's gorgeous In Rainbows.  Notable mentions and hearty handshakes to Burial's Untrue, Low's Drums and Guns, The Besnard Lakes are the Dark Horse, Panda Bear's Person Pitch, Baroness's Red Album and Pig Destroyer's absolutely fucking devastating Phantom Limb.  My iPod Shuffle is a very strange place to be these days.

Flims!  Again, big whopping post for this currently in draft format.  Saw a good wodge of films this year, with the vast majority being really jolly good.  Best ones?  Ratatouille, Bourne Ultimatum, Knocked Up, Once, The Lives of Others, Hot Fuzz... oh, they just keep going.  The worst?  It's a photo-finish between Transformers - I paid to see Transformers, not a bunch of completely uninteresting human characters wibbling on and on and fucking on, and when the robots do turn up they're visually incomprehensible! - and the immensely disappointing Seachd.  Just as Transformers failed at even delivering decent robot violence, so Seachd - filmed on Skye in Gaelic, pretty much its one selling point - had the glorious landscape of the Isle of Skye at its disposal and promptly did fuck-all with it (unlike Stardust, which used Skye to stunning effect).  The storyline was dreary, clichéd and predictable, the whole thing coming across like a third-rate Children's Film Foundation film.  Beware!

Books!  Not read much fiction this year, but Cormac McCarthy's The Road was an absolute stunner and is recommended to damn near everyone, as long as you can handle the sheer sadness of it all.  Few books could inspire both Oprah's Book Club and über-hip MP3 blog Gorilla Vs Bear (the latter proposing a suitable soundtrack that would work a treat).

Telly!  I couldn't give a hoot about physics until I saw Atom on BBC4 earlier this year, at which point my mind was promptly blown, I seriously regretted not realising how awesome this stuff was while I was at school, New Scientist gained a new reader and I got hold of both books by Brian Greene which I have since been reading in parallel for some inconceivable reason.  BBC4 continued to prove itself the worthwhile ying to BBC3s fuck-awful yang by showing Flight of the Conchords, a genuinely funny series that made the third series of The Mighty Boosh look especially overblown, over-hyped and generally over.  A third hurrah for BBC4 thanks to the Transatlantic Sessions series which proved that not all Scottish traditional music has to be tiddly-toddly piffle.

As for life in general, it's rumbled along nicely enough.  The Wii is a glorious console and everyone should have one, it's been especially great getting the Lass into video games (for some bizarre reason she was never all that keen on Black).  Work is going fine, though with added money come added responsibilities that have stopped me from ranting about things I may otherwise have done.  I've also caught myself thinking about work-related stuff during weekends and holidays which never happened before... I've even dreamed about it a few times, which annoyed me immensely considering the more pleasurable things I could be dreaming about.  I've let the internet wind me up more than it should and am resolving to stay the hell away from the comments on the Scotsman, Herald and pretty much any other news site, plus the aforementioned nonsense noise of Etsy Forums, 'nuff' whiners on Cute Overload and fanboy frothing on Kotaku.  There's something guiltily easy about reading idiotic forum posts, like a car crash of intelligence and reason that you can't turn away from.  Well, it's time to just not look in the first bloody place.  Life's short enough.

Anyways, just over two hours until midnight until we tumble into 2008 and this year disintegrates into dust.  I'll be glad to see it go, hoping that next year will - for us at least - be a lot more stable and settled, focusing more on creating and less on fretting.  Who knows, this site might become interesting to read again!  Well, within reason.  So!  To you - no, not them, you - I wish you as nice and soothing a 2008 as I'm hoping for the Burd & I, filled with joyful surprises, tasty meals and big hugs.  With the time left for this year I intend to curl up on the sofa with the lady and enjoy that most cheering of films, The Wicker Man (Directors Cut, mind), with those seasonal themes of renewal, rebirth and Britt Ekland lurching about in the nuddy.  Onwards, my friends, to 2008!  See you on the other side!  Avast!

Christmas Goes To The Dog

Ho-diddly-ho blogarinos!  Hope you're all having a perfectly splendid festive time or at least generally contented with your lot in the world.  As custom befits I am now feeling quite plump following yesterday's feasting, a tad dozy yet still riding the wave of a seven-day sugar rush.  'Twas a typically nice christmas here at the latest Castle Von Naggle, with some glorious vegetables and roast tatties cooked by the Lass and the meaty goodies done by myself.  Inspired by this animation from Weebl, I eschewed all other animals for a piggy special, with bacon, sausagemeat and pork chops from Puddledub Pork and chipolatas from Ballencrieff Rare Pedigree Pigs, all bought at the Edinburgh Farmers Market earlier this month.  Following a recipe from Nigel Slater's Real Cooking I made pork chops & chicory for the main course, pan cooked in white wine with fennel seeds.  It was a doddle to cook in just 30 minutes - goodness knows what Julian Barnes was moaning about - and tasted really good and fresh, the wine sauce taking the place of gravy.

Wonders a-plenty were given and received by the roaring fire and I was particularly jammy to get a My Neighbour Totoro matchbox music box from the Lass, a lovely little piece of work containing two soot spirits and a music box playing the sweetest little melody that, while not being the main theme from Totoro, certainly sounds very Hisaishi-ish and evocative of that most wonderful of films.  Other goodies from the Burd included Varmints, a gorgeous illustrated book ostensibly for kids (you can see some of the artwork here, and if there's not a part two forthcoming by this time next year I'll be storming the offices of Templar Publishing with flaming torches and raging bunnies) and some of my favourite after shave (if only it was spelt h-less).  Cheers sweetheart!

Anyways, one of the gifts I gave was a painting by muggins here for my Mum and, since it turned out well, I can now cheerfully chirrup about it online.  It's an oil painting of Mum's dog Sasha, based on this photo I took of her earlier this year during a game of frisbee which Sasha enjoys with the kind of enthusiasm that comes in capital letters and multiple exclamation marks.  As with my painting of Clod last year, I was more interested in capturing the character and personality of the animal rather than make a photo-real portrait, and I'm pleased to say that I reckon I got it just right.  As with previous paintings, I've included some in-process pictures of the piece just to show how it evolved from the original charcoal drawing on canvas to the finished artwork.

1. Sasha - In Progress (1), 2. Sasha - In Progress (2), 3. Sasha - In Progress (3), 4. Sasha - In Progress (4), 5. Sasha - In Progress (5), 6. Sasha - In Progress (6), 7. Sasha - In Progress (7), 8. Sasha - In Progress (8), 9. Sasha - In Progress (9) 10. Sasha, 2007

Mum was certainly chuffed with the finished piece and it's firmed up my plans to spend much more time next year working on animal artwork.  I'd like to try more animal portraits for commissions, so if any animal owners out there have ever fancied a painting of their pet, have a look at the finished piece below and see what you think.  If nothing else, I'll be getting a year's membership at Edinburgh Zoo in the near future which will allow me to pop in as often as I like.  If I finish 2008 with a few paintings of big cats, gorillas and penguins, I'll be a very happy man.

The Destroyer of Galaxies

NASA Announces Discovery of Assault by a Black Hole

A powerful jet from a supermassive black hole is blasting a nearby galaxy, according to new data from NASA observatories. This never-before witnessed galactic violence may have a profound effect on planets in the jet's path and trigger a burst of star birth in its destructive wake.

This real-life scene, worthy of the most outlandish science fiction, is playing out in a faraway binary galaxy system known as 3C321. Two galaxies are in orbit around one another. A supermassive black hole at the core of the system's larger galaxy is spewing a jet in the direction of its smaller companion.

"We've seen many jets produced by black holes, but this is the first time we've seen one punch into another galaxy," says Dan Evans, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and leader of the study. "This jet could be causing all sorts of problems for the smaller galaxy it is pummeling."

Jets from super massive black holes produce large amounts of radiation, especially high-energy X-rays and gamma-rays, which can be lethal in large quantities. The combined effects of this radiation and particles traveling at almost the speed of light could severely damage the atmospheres of planets lying in the path of the jet. For example, protective layers of ozone in the upper atmosphere of planets could be destroyed.

The effect of the jet on the companion galaxy is likely to be substantial, because the galaxies in 3C321 are extremely close at a distance of only about 20,000 light years apart. They lie approximately the same distance as Earth is from the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

It's A Christmas Miracle!

Joy to the world... well, our own tiny little corner of it anyhow, because the Lass and I have just bought our very first Mac together! Blimey, it must be serious.

It's been over two years since I acquired The Precious and it's worked like a charm. However, since Chazzer's laptop gave up the ghost months back we've both been using Precious as our sole computer, giving it an awful lot of data and applications to deal with. Poor thing's been groaning under the weight of our combined digital shenanigans and it was about time that some kind of action was taken. The Lass, bless her ever-glowing heart, was the one to initially suggest getting an iMac together, a higher-spec desktop computer that could easily take the majority of the data and work, freeing up the iBook for general web-browsing, writing and such. Since then it's been a case of waiting for the right credit card promo deal to come up, and a couple of weeks back I applied for the HSBC Mastercard offering 12 months of 0% on new purchases, damn near ideal for our intentions. Once the card landed in my sticky paws last week, it was a double-quick-click to the Apple Store and within minutes a 20" iMac with 2.4 GHz, 2GB RAM and 500 GB HD was ordered. The wait began as the Apple elves got to work...

Fast forward a couple of days and it was delivered to our flat (though, as we were out, it was left with an apartment upstairs... which we had no idea about until one of the occupants knocked on our door Saturday afternoon and my jaw hit the floor). Unpacking as excited as any sprog on Christmas Day followed and the big shiny beauty now sits temporarily on our dining table while the work room gets reorganised into Mac half/painting half (and never the twain shall meet). Ludicrously simple to set up, the transfer of apps, files and both our accounts from iBook to iMac was painless and perfect. Having done so, I wiped and reinstalled OS X onto the iBook, later using the dotMac Sync function to share my browser bookmarks, contacts, calendars and such between both machines. The wireless connection between Big Mac and Little Mac mean that the Lass can be uploading photos on the iBook (as she is right now) before saving the photos on the iMac for storing on iPhoto, even while I'm still using the iMac to write this. Nifty, no? As hoped, the iBook - freed from the weight of all those MP3s, images and memory-devouring applications - is now running at as fast and perky a speed as it did way back in September 2005, making fast work of websites it used to stumble under.

The iMac, aka Big Mac, aka The Shiny, has left us both pretty much speechless. Amazingly, it actually exceeds our expectations, from the super-sharp display to the very design of the iMac that looks as though it belongs in the 21st century I always wanted to live in, rather than the warmed-up-1980s that we've ended up with. Music sounds surprisingly deep and clear coming from the nicely-concealed speakers and the computer runs at a remarkable speed, zipping through processor-heavy tasks with barely a shrug, allowing numerous RAM-greedy apps to run simultaneously without the slightest slowdown. The new Leopard version of OS X is a stunner, particularly the updated iLife suite, and the Time Machine function has finally spurred me on to get an external back-up drive, partly as a form of digital insurance but also because the idea of seeing it at work is just too damn snazzy. The whopping hard drive means I can start transferring pretty much all my favourite tracks from CDs onto the Mac, from which they can then be streamed onto our sound system via the Wii and Wii Transfer.

All in all, and completely predictably, I am utterly smitten with this stunning piece of tech, as is my much better half who had the glorious idea in the first place. It also means I can use the christmas break to focus on redesigning jonnagl.com to hopefully set up an online store for my artwork there rather than relying on the increasingly dizzy Etsy. Blogging from both of us should increase now neither of us has to wait for t'other to finish using the computer - hurrah for simultaneous nerding! And, through the joys of the built-in iSight camera and Photo Booth, we can now share our beauty with the world all the more. Enjoy!

Oh Lord, What Madness Hath Science Wrought?

Jesus christ.  Next thing you know they'll be able to hover, light fires and develop thumbs, and then that's us fucked.  Gentlemen, I give you... the future!

Cloned cats glow red in the dark

Cat's eyes are no longer the only things about them that glow in the dark, after scientists cloned a fluorescent feline.

South Korean Kong Il-Keun's team cloned cats after modifying a gene to change their skin colour.

The two Turkish Angora cats now glow red when exposed to ultraviolet light. The scientists believe the process could be used to develop treatments for human genetic diseases and could help reproduce rare animals.

Nice to see I Can Has Cheezburger ready with a prompt response.

What's That Floating In The Water?

Not old Neptune's only daughter - it's a teaser poster for the next animated feature from Studio Ghibli by the godlike genial genius that is Hayao Miyazaki.

The film will be called Gake no ue no Ponyo (Ponyo On A Cliff) and is reportedly about a goldfish princess who wants to become human.  There's an official website, but as it's completely in Japanese you may prefer to check out the Wikipedia page or Nausicaa.net, while keeping up with the news at GhibliWorld.  The prospect of a Miyazaki film using a distinct handpainted watercolour look is tantalising indeed, and could end up being the non plus ultra of the underwater-animated-feature genre alongside Finding Nemo, The Little Mermaid and Help I Am A Fish, a film only notable for being translated into French as Gloups! Je Suis Un Poisson! which is exceedingly satisfying to say out loud, preferably in an outraged French accent.  Go ahead, try it!

Technorati Tags: ghibli, miyazaki

The Wii And How To Swing It

It was back in the balmy days of April that I got my clammy hands on a Nintendo Wii, the first games console I'd bought since getting a second-hand Xbox in 2003 for the sole purpose of playing Halo.  I promptly took photos of myself whirling around like a loon but haven't really said much about it since.  Now, with Christmas hurtling towards us like a runaway juggernaut, some of youse may be hoping to get your own little white games box, or already acquired your own and wondering what games to stick on your list before it goes up the chimney.  Rest easy, for here's the Falling Sky guide to Wii games, or at least the games I've actually played this year (there's plenty of good-looking ones I haven't yet got - most notably Metroid Prime Corruption, Zack & Wiki, Guitar Hero 3 - but those'll just have to wait until I've had a go).  Oh, and if you want to have Miis of the Lass & I wandering around your own Wii, our number is 5335 4776 6303 9151 - go on, leave your own in the comments and we'll pop over in digital form.

WII SPORTS

It comes with the console (unless you're in Japan, but then you get to see Studio Ghibli films first so nerrrr) and it's still one of the best games you can get.  Wii Sports utilises the motion-sensitive Wii controls so intuitively and naturally that if someone completely new to the Wii comes round I just load up Tennis, hand them the Wiimote and say "off you go".  Within 30 seconds their eyes are lit up and limbs are swinging all over the shop.  I prefer Tennis and Boxing the most - although the latter can be infuriating, that's more than balanced out by the sheer rush of what is essentially glorified shadow-boxing - but Bowling is also huge fun.  It's clearly made for playing with others, and there's few joys like two-player tennis with your sweetheart, but also works fine solo, especially the training sections.  If you've ever wanted to bowl a ball through a hundred pins or so, now you can.  Wii Sports is so deceptively simple you almost take it for granted, and it's arguably the most accessible and immediately enjoyable game I've ever played.

WII PLAY

Wii Play comes with an extra Wiimote, so all things considered you basically pay £5 more to get Wii Play on top of the cost of a Wiimote on it's tod.  If it were full price it'd be guff, but for a fiver it's good fun, made up of a number of short and (relatively) simple minigames that basically get you used to the various ways the Wii controller can be used in games.  There's a target-shooting game, ping-pong, laser hockey, tanks and, er, racing knitted cows across a stitchwork track.  Twelve games in all, most of which would be pretty ho-hum on single player but can become good simple fun with a second player joining in.  Unlike Wii Sports, we haven't really played this game much since the initial play, but it's ideal for introducing visitors to the system, especially little 'uns, and it is good for some short simple multi-player thrills.  And knitted cows.  Still can't quite get over that one.

RAYMAN RAVING RABBIDS

MENTAL.  Absolutely bloody insane.  A brilliant collection of mini-games that are both physically hard work (though nowhere near Boxing) and, crucially, genuinely hilarious.  The rabbids are ostensibly the villains of the piece, but they're really too gormless and daft to feel any animosity for them.  Instead, their actions, expressions and shrieks - "DAAAAAAH!!!" - had me laughing out loud way too much while playing the games, which veer from pumping carrot juice at oncoming rabbids to slapping off-key singers, yanking worms from rotting teeth to clobbering a bunny on the bonce with a hammer.  The key games are variations on a superb on-rails shooting game (but don't worry, you're only firing plungers) and - my favourite - a rhythm game where you shake the controls in time to the beat as your character grooves on a dancefloor and an audience applauds/curses your funky powers.  Honestly, I never knew watching a bunch of rabbits throwing shapes to 'Girls Just Wanna Have Fun' would be such a pleasure, but trust me, it is.  It's also the perfect pick-me-up if I'm ever feeling grumpy, because there's no way I can maintain a sulk when faced with these shrieking goggle-eyed berks.

THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: TWILIGHT PRINCESS

From the ridiculous to the gloriously sublime.  The Legend of Zelda is a series of increasingly epic and awesome fantasy games that started in 1986 on the NES and included the solid-gold classic that is Ocarina Of Time on the N64 in 1998.  The last one I played was The Wind Waker on the Game Cube and that was bloody ace, but Twilight Princess absolutely bowled me over.  Frankly, I reckon it's up there with the Lord of the Rings films for sheer epic scope, vision and a stunning combination of excellent storytelling and well-directed drama - when I finally completed Twilight Princess over this year the feeling was reminiscent of reaching the end of Return of the King (extended edition, mind) or coming to the end of Neil Gaiman's Sandman series.  So the story's a whopper, the visuals are stunning and incredibly atmospheric - thankfully, it's also an extremely enjoyable game to play, building on the brilliance of previous Zelda games and still managing to come up with something fresh, original and unpredictable.  Using the Wii controllers to physically move in swordfights felt more involving, while the targeting system for firing arrows worked a treat.  Even though I've completed it, I still look forward to replaying Twilight Princess sometime in the next couple of years, much as I'd go back to a particularly satisfying book or film.  If you've got the time to invest in it - this isn't a game you'd pop on for 20 minutes a day, deserving at least an hour or two of focused play when you're on it - you'll have an amazing time.  Definitely one of the best single-player games I've ever played, and equal to Ocarina of Time in originality, imagination and all-round excellence, Twilight Princess is fantasy adventure honed to perfection.

WARIOWARE: SMOOTH MOVES

Back to the ridiculous... and how.  Another mini-game collection, but these are far stranger, faster and more energetic than anything else out there - we've just got Mario Party 8 and while it's a lot of fun, it's can't help feeling rather pedestrian compared to this.  Hell, even the madness of the aforementioned Rayman Raving Rabbids pales in comparison with the full-on barking hyper-mania of Smooth Moves.  Absolutely stuffed with short games - most lasting for less than ten seconds - Warioware uses the Wii controllers with more variety than anything else I've seen out there.  The entire game seems to be on the fastest of sugar rushes, reminiscent of incomprehensible Japanese game shows, complete with ludicrously catchy music (ah, the theme driving through Diamond City...).  The sheer strangeness of it all, the way it doesn't seem remotely bothered about looking polished, next-gen, professional, is one of the charms, especially as behind the apparently simple visuals is a surprisingly rich collection of mini-games.  For anyone planning multiplayer gaming, this is nigh-on essential - it's the kind of thing anyone can pick up and the sheer speed of it means that if you don't like one game, another one'll be along in a couple of seconds.  There's no way of playing this slumped back or half-hearted - you have to get up on your feet and be quite prepared to bounce around like a lunatic on fast-forward, thereby making it an absolute cracker with a few friends.  Like Wii Sports, it's the kind of game that'll get popped on every now and then, especially when anyone comes to visit, and no doubt will continue to be.  Mind you, the (awesome) pairs-jumping game is probably best kept 'til there's no-one living below.

WII BRAIN ACADEMY

Another collection of mini-games, but this is a world away from Warioware and the Rabbids, being a far more cerebral selection.  No wonder - it's the Wii version of those hugely successful Brain Training titles on the DS.  It's the kind of game that works best played for a little bit every day, rather than the multi-hour sessions you'd have with Zelda, RE4 or SMG.  Perfectly fine played solo, it's that bit more enjoyable with someone else around, whether it's to whisper hints for maths puzzles or to play against each other in a mental race through mini-games.  The whole thing is based around a school setting, with your Miis cheerfully bouncing around before being called to order by Professor Lobe, the bespectacled mustachioed jellybaby you see above.  Personally, I reckon he's one of the best aspects of the game, beginning each daily session with a where-the-hell-did-that-come-from bit of meandering philosophy that I find hugely endearing.  The range of tests is just varied enough, and don't suffer from replaying, especially as the difficulty level increases.  It's a good choice for non-gamers too, and the lasses in particularly warm to it, but maybe that's just down to the inscrutable charms of Prof Lobe.

RESIDENT EVIL 4

Oh, fucking GET IN.  While I've enjoyed all the games thus far, after a few months I must confess I was hoping for a game that'd get a bit nasty, a bit vile.  Pastel coloured Miis and wide-eyed bunnies are all very well, and the glorious fantasy visuals of Zelda were downright intoxicating, but I wanted to see how the Wii would handle something grim and proper, preferably with buckets of blood, entrails and naughty words.  Thank goodness then for a Wii port of Resident Evil 4, already recognised as one of the finest games in the last five years on GameCube and PS2.  I'd never played it until it came to the Wii, so it was a brand new experience... and, sweet jesus, what an experience.  It's fucking incredible, extremely cinematic and genuinely thrilling to play, plus the storyline and designs are as good as you could hope for from a quality horror film as it veers from sinister rural-types to parasitical nasties, spooky cowl-clad monks and a thoroughly disturbing scientific laboratory sequence.  My only complaint was that it resolved itself a little too easily near the end (though still far more satisfying than, say, Halo 2), but that was after well over 15 hours of full-on brilliance.  On top of all that, once you finish the main game a whole bunch of extra games are unlocked, which I'm saving for another time post-SMG.  Playing this on the Wii means you're physically pointing at the nasties to target them, making it that bit more immersive, flicking your wrist to reload, and the game looks and sounds grim, scary and vicious as fuck.  Hooray!  More of this sort of thing!

SUPER MARIO GALAXY

WOAH.  Fucking WOAH.  The reviews praised this to the stars and they weren't remotely wrong.  The true successor to the sheer genius of Super Mario 64 (recently placed as the 5th best game of all time by IGN), Super Mario Galaxy is about as perfect as you could ever want it to be.  It's the only game out of those featured here that I've not completed - 58 stars at time of writing - and I've already had far, far more than my money's worth of joy from playing this game.  From the title screen, where twinkly piano music plays over a gently spinning view of comets and a curved planet, the over-riding feeling is of pure quality and class.  So much so, it's how you'd imagine a Studio Ghibli game to be if they actually made one and it was as good as their finest films.  The imagination on show here is quite astounding - every time you travel to a galaxy there's really no telling what you're going to see or do - taking the idea of a platforming game to heights that seem utterly unbeatable.  Honestly, how the hell do you top a game like this?  The motion controls of the Wii are used relatively gently - you can play it sitting down, thank goodness - yet still effectively, especially the feature allowing a second player to get involved hunting for star-bits on screen or firing said bits at beasties.  Seriously, the closest I've come to excellence like this in gaming was playing the above Twilight Princess, the original Halo on Xbox, Ocarina of Time on the N64 and Head Over Heels on the ZX Spectrum, yet SMG really does bound over them all.  The music is stunning, as good as Joe Hisaishi's scores for Ghibli films (I've got particular love for the racing theme, heard when racing penguins, riding a manta-ray, that sort of thing), while the visuals eschew the ultra-realism that Xbox 360 and PS3 continuously reach for, instead taking the Mario style to gorgeous new levels while still echoing level and character designs from all the way back to Super Mario Bros.  Even just moving around is a joy - oh, the triple jump! - and, and, and... y'know, I could go on about this for pages, but there's no fun in that.  It's a game that's all the more delightful for the surprises it holds in store, so I'm certainly not going to go spoiling any.  But if you've got a Wii and not yet played SMG... oh my friend, the treats you're in for, hour after hour of delights, eyes wide with genuine wonder.  Game of the year, pure and simple.

She Will Outlive Us All

All this, and eight lives still to go...

Cat, 26, could be record breaker

A 26-year-old domestic cat from Shropshire could be one of the oldest in the UK.

Pussywillow lives in Ratlinghope and is still "sharp in her mind and her eyes", according to owner Lin Brown.

The black cat, who now enjoys curling up by the stove, lived off animals she caught herself until she was 22, Ms Brown said.

[...] The family only started feeding the elderly feline after she survived an attack by a fox four years ago.

There's a nice radio interview with the owner featuring a Rayburn, bright eyes and the tale of the fox attack.  Meanwhile, in Japan, Starbucks might as well just give up...

Cat cafe soothes Tokyo's busy feline lovers

The 14 felines-in-residence at Tokyo's Cat Cafe Calico excel at their job of making customers purr with delight.

[...] Calico is one of at least three cafes that have opened up in Tokyo this year where visitors can mingle with cats as they enjoy a cup of tea.

Takafumi Fukui, the 34-year-old owner and a long-time cat lover, quit his job at a television game company and started the cafe in March.

"In Tokyo, it's not that easy to have cats," he said, explaining that tight housing regulations often forbid pets.

Visitors to Calico pay 800 yen ($7) an hour or 2,000 yen for three hours in a big room where 14 well-brushed and shampooed cats hang out. After a thorough handwash, the visitor can play with the cats, read comics or just relax.

The café website is a nifty read, despite being completely in Japanese.  The photo-pages alone could keep Cheezburger rich in material for months, while this little QuickTime movie amused me nicely.  Now, if we could just convince the Caley to do the same...

On Vox: State of Plan

*blows dust off the site*

Whoops, rather let this slip into the shadows over the last half year haven't I? Nonetheless, The Plan continues apace, with further developments and ponderings on the how-to-make-a-living-once-living-on-Skye issue especially. Let's look at what's been happening...

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