They had an infertile rhino on yesterday. Supervets is the best programme EVER.

So you're watching TV, minding your own business, when you hear the immortal line, "Tonight on Supervets!" Just another Wednesday night on the BBC. Tonight on Supervets, so far there's a horse on a treadmill and a dog being sliced open. Fascinating stuff.

Roll on the start of the new Parliamentary year, that's what I say. I can't wait for Question Time to come back on the telly - a free-for-all, with a panel of top politicians (of the very highest calibre) and a baying mob of whoever walked in off the street shouting at them, unedited and live on TV every Thursday night. And whatever happened to Jeremy Paxman? Yes, my beloved Paxman has been off TV for a while. My daily Newsnight e-mails have been coming from Gavin Esler and Kirsty Wark for weeks now, with not a single Paxman e-mail in sight.

Three minutes into Supervets, and they're doing an ultrasound scan on a pregnant dog. Fascinating stuff.

Tragedy on Supervets - Louis the dog has suffered some difficulties on the operating table. It seems he needs a shock from the defib unit because his heart has given out. Charging... clear! *BOOM*

Will Louis the dog make it through? Tune in next week to find out, apparently. Whether Louis will be undergoing doggy CPR for the entire week is left unclear. Initial reports that no-one actually gives a flying fuck are still unsubstantiated.

Fascinating stuff.

Who actually plays Second Life? Anyone? I'm always hearing about it, but no-one appears to actually be prepared to admit to playing it. This is possibly because you can't actually do anything that isn't already available to you in First Life - or actual living. So why would anyone bother taking on a Second Life experience?

So I wonder, is anyone prepared to admit to playing Second Life in a public setting? Come now, let's have a show of hands.

If I had a penis, I wonder if I could reach to go down on myself?

Mushroom Soup

You will need:

A shitload of mushrooms (chestnut mushrooms work best),
A couple of cloves of garlic,
Some single cream,
Freshly ground black pepper,
Water,
A fucking great big massive stockpot.

1. Chop all the mushrooms up, fairly roughly but keep them quite small, especially if you don't have a blender.
2. Stick the mushrooms in the fucking great big massive stockpot, along with the bashed up cloves of garlic.
3. Pour in cold water, just enough so that it almost covers the mushrooms.
4. Bring to the boil, stirring constantly, then reduce heat and allow to simmer gently for around one hour. During this time, you should check the soup periodically, and give it a gentle stir every 10 minutes or so. If the water has all evaporated, add a little more.
5. Remove from the heat and blend the soup, together with single cream to taste (it'll look a sort of brownish-grey colour). If you don't have a blender, just stir in the single cream.
6. Chuck LOADS of freshly ground black pepper in there, simmer it gently for another 5-10 minutes or so, stirring constantly.
7. Serve with loads of (ideally freshly-baked) granary bread.

---

Onion Soup

You will need:

Vast quantities of onions - red, white, whatever you can get your hands on. Chives too if they're in season, shallots if you can get them, and scallions if it's the right time of year;
A couple of cloves of garlic;
Beef stock - home made or stock cubes & water;
A fucking great big huge massive stockpot;
Crusty bread rolls;
Cheddar cheese;
Worcestershire sauce.

English to American translations:
"Scallions" are "spring onions"
Cheddar cheese is fairly similar to Monterey Jack
Worcestershire sauce is a liquid garnish, great for anything meaty. It is sold in the US but is fairly expensive there, although one bottle goes a LONG WAY and will last for months after opening. Look for "Lea & Perrins". This is optional so if you can't find it, don't worry about it, although you should get it if you can.

1. Chop up all the onions and stick them all in the great big fucking massive stockpot. If this sets off the waterworks, you should top, tail & peel the skin off the onions, then soak them in cold water for ten minutes before chopping them up - this will prevent you looking like a 4 year old who has just been told that Santa is dead.
2. Bash up some garlic and stick that in there as well.
3. Pour in the beef stock until it covers all the onions.
4. Bring it to the boil and then allow it to simmer over a medium heat for about 1 hour, stirring occasionally.
5. Slice the bread rolls in half lengthways, then slice the cheese and put a generous helping on each half of the bread. Pour over a dash of Worcestershire sauce (bear in mind that a little goes a long way - this stuff has a fairly strong taste so you really don't need very much), then stick it under a grill for just a couple of minutes, just until the cheese is bubbling a little and oozing.
6. Serve the soup and bread & cheese immediately. Lovely!

Having got rather into this whole TT thing, I've decided I don't want to go out of the running just yet. I want more feedback, dammit! I am in it to learn, after all, and you can't learn that much in just a few short weeks. I want to have a go at making it through to the play-offs. I'm not even sure what the play-offs are, but what the hell, I'll have a go. After all, I'm in it now, so why not?

Yes I'm currently in joint-last place. But I may as well have a try, so I figure I will. Which means I need to beat Zig. Sure he's a good writer but no-one's unbeatable.

If I don't beat Zig, I'm going to stop eating cashew nuts for a week. It'll be a hard slog, but somewhere deep down inside I know I have the presence of mind to do it. Beat Zig, or no more cashew nuts.

Life is hard.

Special blog post for Suskie to have another hissy fit in.

You keep on wasting your time, boyo. Be my guest.

Thanks to me having the backbone to actually sack one of my team (in that tourney thing that Emp guilt-tripped me into doing), I have time to write again, yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!

Tom wasn't picking his own reviews after the first week. Tom wasn't even posting. Tom wasn't paying any attention whatsoever. Tom didn't reply to my e-mails. I doubt he'll even notice it's happened. I fully expect to get an e-mail from him in a few months from now, saying, "Did we win?"

So here's to Tom Clark, the very essence of "reliability". Raise your glasses, folks. To Tom Clark! Cheers!

Thankyou VERY fucking much.

I should have just gone with my instincts in the first place and taken a risk with Vorty. I trust him to do a good job and he's a writer I look up to, so it should be interesting to see how this plays out.

That's a damn good excuse for me to go do some baking.

So my sickly kid brother has brought some kind of evil virus into the house and now I'm infected and I'm not supposed to leave for two weeks because it's highly contagious and I might infect old people.

Fucking moron.

I get cranky when I'm ill. Expect me to be absolutely fine within a day, and yet STILL be contagious and therefore EXTREMELY ANNOYED, because the weather's nice and I want to go to the pub. ;_;

I love my Dreamcast. I'll be honest about that from the get-go. It is a machine that I will never part with; nor will I part with any of my games for it. Whilst my fondness for other consoles sometimes wanes, my Dreamcast remains permanently plugged into the back of my TV and I play it more often than my newer consoles, even though I have owned it for seven years now. It never bores me, it never lets me down, and it is always a joy to use. I have never regretted buying it even for a moment. Sega's last console is much maligned and really under-appreciated. Arguably, it didn't actually fail - sales were mediocre, but the console had a solid support base; solid enough that until as late as 2004, new games were still being released for the console in Japan.

I am writing this review now because I am becoming increasingly disenchanted with the games industry as a whole. There is not a great deal of originality anymore, with the market being flooded by generic mainstream releases while small developers are disappearing left right and centre. The Dreamcast for me is really the antithesis for the current situation - the console itself was powerful and had great graphical capabilities, and games were produced for it by lots of small firms. This gave rise to a great library of highly original games. Titles such as Chu Chu Rocket (which was one of the games which often came bundled with the machine), Fur Fighters and Shenmue offered something which was scarcely available on other consoles then and remains elusive now - new experiences. Games were produced which were so different from everything else available that it would be difficult to categorise them into a genre at all. What happened to this situation? Why are games like this not still released? What was so different about the
Dreamcast?

I did some research, and the best answer I could come up with was that the Dreamcast was comparatively cheap and easy to program for. I do not know if this is true, but it is what I heard from several different sources so it would appear so. The low costs of programming (for whatever reason that was the case) meant that developers could make niche or experimental games with little real risk to their finances (compared to the level of risk involved for more costly productions) and this gave rise to the Dreamcast's spectacular array of new, original titles. Whether this is the real reason or not, even the best console is only as good as the games which are made for it, so clearly this is of consequence. The fact is that the Dreamcast's complementary library was of a phenomenally high standard and so this certainly helped to make the console as great as, in my view, it was.

The graphical and audio capabilities were quite simply the best available on the market at the time the Dreamcast was released. The Dreamcast is a 128 bit console - far more powerful than its contemporary competition, the Nintendo64 (64 bit) and the PlayStation One (32 bit). However, although the graphics were the best on the market, they could sometimes be rather blocky, and this was more evident in some games than others. This is mostly a gripe by today's standards though - I don't really remember noticing this at the time I first bought the console, and it would be unfair to judge what is, after all, an old machine by technological standards, by what we expect today.

Of course, the machine isn't without its flaws though. The controller is particularly irksome - even though the main console is streamlined in appearance, the controller is clunky and large with a cumbersome button layout. Using it doesn't feel natural in the slightest and it can be difficult to use initially for this reason. The layout never really compromises gameplay mechanics though - it's just illogical and completely different from any other consoles' controllers you may already be used to. The main problem is that the controller is so big, and the analogue stick is placed quite high up, meaning you have to reach your thumb up too high, so holding the controller is uncomfortable unless you hold the sides rather than the underneath (as you may be used to doing). The same problem is evident on the other side of the controller too, where the main buttons used for gameplay are situated.

There is one innovation relating to the controller which is certainly welcome, and this is in the form of the Visual Memory Units which the Dreamcast uses. These are memory cards holding game saves which slot into the top of the controller. They look like tiny portable games systems, and this is arguably what they are - many Dreamcast releases had mini-games involved, and these used the VMUs as their medium. This meant that you could import some element of the main game onto your VMU and take it away with you while you were out to play, then slot it back into your controller to rejoin the main game. This was a very clever trick and great fun to do, and was perhaps the inspiration behind Nintendo's link-up system for GameBoy Advance and the GameCube.

The problem with this is that the batteries in the VMUs tend only to give a few short hours of gameplay, and these are difficult and fiddly to replace. So while you have this exciting, addictive element of gameplay, you have to be prepared to bear the cost and hassle of replacing the batteries frequently if you are really going to progress with it. The VMUs do have other uses though - the screens are handy for tracking game progress (some games use the screens - which are visible through the controller when the VMU is plugged in - to show gameplay data while you play) and when the VMUs are slotted into the controller, they don't require any battery usage. So they're like interactive memory cards, basically. The memory capacity does have a tendency to be filled alarmingly quickly, but if you're willing to spend the time sorting out your save files every so often, the capacity is adequate for playing a handful of games at once.

The final aspect of the Dreamcast which I am going to discuss is the online side of things. The Dreamcast was the first mass-market console to take gameplay online, although the majority of people didn't participate in this. Broadband was really in its infancy when this was happening, so those who did take their consoles online often had to deal with high dial-up charges, and this is perhaps why it wasn't as popular as Sega had anticipated, and as popular as it deserved to be. Online games had small communities but they were fun to participate in. Most games had some online element, even if it was simply a set of additional features or information that could be accessed online. A series of peripherals were designed to help facilitate this - the mouse and keyboard being the most widely used. Browsing the internet using your Dreamcast, however, was a painful experience. Painfully slow, that is. Mercifully, most people never experienced this. If you want to know what it was like, then imagine communicating using the science teachers' favorite method of two empty yogurt cartons attached by a piece of string, and you might start to get an idea of the kind of paces involved with trying to load a page.

Overall, the Dreamcast is a great machine. They can be bought so cheaply these days, with the games available easily and in large quantities on internet auction sites. So many wonderfully original games exist for it that it is an essential system for any gamer to own. If you are prepared to deal with the button layout, and you keep it offline, it really has very few faults at all. I love my Dreamcast, and I always will.

I'm not sure what to do with this yet or whether even to use it or not. Anyone actually looking at this, and if so, any ideas?