In Bruges

Two hitmen are sent to Bruges to cool their heels after a hit gone wrong. I really can't say anything more than that without spoiling it, but this was just an amazing, hypnotic movie, holding my attention effortlessly the whole way through. tisme and I wandered back from the cinema saying "What about this scene?", "What about that one?", etc. - both of us thoroughly impressed by the whole thing.

Go see.

Ride your music

Many years ago, in the dawn times, back when I was a small child, we loaded games onto our computer from tapes. These played hissy, bleepy sounds, (not entirely different from modem noises) which the computer would convert into code, allowing us access to all the miracles the BBC Micro could perform.

My brothers and I would fantasise at the idea of feeding the computer something really cool (like the star wars soundtrack) and seeing what wonders would spew forth from the monitor it was attached. Truly this would be the epitome of sheer computerised coolness.

Twenty-five years later Audiosurf has come along. A brilliantly simple cross between a "dropping blocks" game (like Klax or a simplified Tetris) and a track race game (F-Zero, Wipeout), with the genius bit being that it automatically generates the racetracks based on your music collection. You pick the song you want to listen to, slow bits are uphill, fast bits are downhill, and blocks are placed to be picked up with beats. And because it's always generated in the same way, you can compare your scored to people all over the world who have driven to that particular song.

The very, very best bit? It's $10 on Steam. Or a fiver of your hard-earned British pounds.

If that isn't the best use of a fiver this weekend then I don't know what is...

Friendfeed

If you've got a bunch of different sites you post stuff on (Flickr, del.icio.us, stumbleupon, etc.) and you'd like to be able to aggregate them so that people can see them all in one place, then FriendFeed seems to be a good solution. I'm feeding all of my stuff into it - and picking up the same from a few people on it. It's got lots of control over what you get in your list (so you can ignore youtube videos, for instance).

Worth taking a look at, if you have a distributed presence (or six) that you'd like to draw together.

I suspect that it's the kind of thing that Google Distributed Friends Graph thing (that brad is currently working on) will help a lot with...

(cheers to sbisson for pointing me at it)

I have news for you

If I know you well, and we've spent any significant time together, then you have almost certainly pissed me off.

Maybe not in a serious way. And maybe not over anything important. But you have either let me down, or expected too much, or said something I disapproved of, or treated someone badly, or changed plans on me at the last minute, or insulted me, or overreacted to something trivial, or committed some other minor crime.

It is highly likely that at some point later that day I will have turned to some other friend and said "Goddamn, today I was talking to X and you will not believe what they did!"

Yup. That's right. I will have bitched about you behind your back.

Not only that, but it's almost certain that the person I was talking to will then have reciprocated along the lines of "I know! They did the same thing to Y just the other day!"

Yes - it's worse than you thought - _all_ of your friends bitch about you behind your back.

And there's fuck all you can do about it.

Not that you should care. Because you do it too. We all do it. Every single one of us.

Which leaves me fucking _baffled_ why people would act surprised, shocked and hurt that their friends would invade their privacy by talking about them when they aren't there. Or feel that because their friends bitch about them they aren't _really_ their friends. Of course we are - if we didn't care about you then we wouldn't care what you did - and we certainly wouldn't expend energy on bitching about you.

We bitch because you're human - and that means that now and again you suck. We bitch because we need a release - to let out the stresses that occur in any relationship.

We bitch because we care.

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I wonder how many people think this is directly aimed at them...