Billy Tompson: Best of Chatterbox: hooting into the abyss

The most intriguing snippets of conversational brilliance from the Gamesblog's Chatterbox debating chamber.

Ah, what a week it was. England had just won the second Ashes test (little did we know what was to come), the kids were enjoying Gran Turismo 5 and Panorama was preparing to foist a tabloid farce onto the unsuspecting British public, every member of whom knew more about games than the programme's presenter. Yep that was December 6-10, 2010 alright. And now you can relive all the conversational thrills and communicative spills from that golden five-day period, courtesy of another 'Best of Chatterbox', the world's most oxymoronic online regular.

This week's edition was compiled by Herecomestreble. "Can you be sure to make it clear that I didn't actually write any of this?" he requested in his email to me. "Actually, there's a couple of quotes from me still in there, so I'd prefer it if you didn't mention me at all."

Oops.

Monday December 6

Another Baltic week began on a high note: England absolutely beasting the Aussies in the cricket over the weekend. Hurrah! [Oh the hubris ? Keef]

Fantomex soon made an early bid to ruin the day's conversation by asking "So, what cartoon character would you [enjoy carnal relations] with?"

Happily the vast majority of the blog ignored him, and normal service resumed with the usual tales of weekend gaming, film, music, food and drink consumption.

Fantasy-book-recommendation blog reappeared for a bit (Joe Abercrombie, Stephen Erikson, R. Scott Bakker since you ask) until the question of everyone's Game of The Year hoved into view. Lists! About games! This was basically chocolate-coated chat crack, and everyone helped themselves to seconds.

There's a game about cars which is proving quite popular, Gin & Tonic 5 or something? Whatever it is, it was responsible for around 93.4% of Monday's conversation. As far as your humble correspondent can make out, GT5 seems to consist of customising virtual vehicles, swapping them between your friends, and then getting a computer man to drive them for you. So, it's basically Pokemon GTi then.

"I'm-not-really-a-LARPer," Scamander rolled up with a chewy quandary for elevenses: "quick question here ? assuming everything has mass, how much does the interweb weigh?" This was too much for the poor, struggling brains of the blog, with even resident Pedantichrist CunningStunt admitting, "I wouldn't know where to start on how to estimate how many electrons there are in the internet." Quitters.

Sheep2 treated us to a glimpse of the future with his predictions of what we'll be playing in 15 years' time:

- Street Fighter 9
- Gran Turismo 7 Prologue
- Call of Duty 22
- Football Manager 2025
- Duke Nukem Forever

The last one seems vanishingly unlikely.

New recordings of Norwich's Alan Partridge prompted TonyHayers to take a break from singlehandedly saving Christmas to regale us with all the new phrases he'd learned. If you can imagine how Bumblebee in the Transformers films communicates via snippets of radio broadcasts, you're pretty much there in terms of how Hayers interacts with other people. Later in the afternoon there were some quite hideous mental images being flung around. Suffice to say that the words "lap", "dance", "tassels", and "CunningStunt" should never, ever appear in proximity to each other.

Quote of The Day
There wasn't one. GT5 saw to that.

Games: GT5, Blops, GT5, BFBC2, GT5, Assassin's Creed Brotherhood, GT5

Tuesday

What goes down? Everything goes down.
Nothing goes down...

People. Humanity. Apes expanding into a realm of pure leisure, then hooting about it on the internet. Just hooting about it on the Chatterbox.

At the Chatterbox there is a new trend. People log in and call the other posters by a nonsensical pseudo-humourous name. "Blog munchers". That kind of thing. Tuesday had a lot of this.

Bloatboy posted loads. But if you want to read it then you had better go back to source.

Do you want to read it?

Panorama said games were addictive. To a belligerent response.

And the day ended with talk of chicken sandwich fillings.

Human apes: Hooting into the abyss.

Quotations

"Yesterday - I was leaving work, and I saw a young girl from Coronation Street being photographed. The photographer was telling her to look natural, like it was one of those 'Spotted Out-and-About' features. The young lady was taking direction from the photographer. It was all a set-up."
HereComesTreble tackles the artifice of stardom

"A fridge saved Indiana Jones from an atomic bomb ? it's a sturdy weapon of choice"
SerenVikity gets the terms 'weapon' and 'ridiculous plot device' confused

"My gran used to put whole eggs (in their shell) inside a chicken while it was roasting. You'd get a roast chicken and roast (seriously hard-boiled) eggs too."
SageSmith with a tip from his best-selling cookery book

Wednesday

The word on the street is that SSX is coming back. This was a genuine bit of gaming news. A few people seemed happy, most were too sick of snow to build up any kind of enthusiasm.

Chat for the day focused on the Panorama show regarding games addiction. Predictably it was presented by a man who had almost zero knowledge on the subject. Apparently he had some kids who played games and he knew who 'Laura Croft' was; which seemingly qualifies him to present a national television show on the matter. So we followed that well travelled path of outraged parental concern and sensationalised ignorance based on a few isolated but tragic cases and in the end learnt very little.

"Really scraping the barrel to find their subjects - the long haired freak, the boy who screamed at his mum." This was the opening statement from EnglishRed, however it wasn't all doom and gloom as he soon managed to find some common ground: "I particularly liked the WoW player who they kept showing as his wall was plastered with Games Workshop art".

A personal tale from Cameroon whose sibling apparently once was hooked on Call of Duty led Makar27 to question him: "What happened when your brother had the router taken away? Did he kick your door in? Did your Mum and Dad try hitting him lots first?"

The only other chat perhaps worth reporting today was on The Christmas Office Party. It was summed up succinctly by TonyHayers who managed to successfully encapsulate this awkward festive workplace celebration into one simple sentence: 'F*ck off, Neil from Accounts.'

The day finished with the discussion as to who was the most sexually alluring cartoon character [again? Really? ? Keef]. It didn't quite confirm my suspicion that about half the blog are Hentai enthusiasts, but EnglishRed correctly pointed out that getting turned on by a cartoon character is 'the preserve of the social inadequate.'

Most of the blog went for Jessica Rabbit.

Quote of the day

"I think Ashley really likes the parachute payments"
BigWorv tries to make sense of BigMike's actions.

Thursday

Thursday dawned with a few new bloggers sticking their heads above the parapet ? two declaiming their love of those opposing Chatterbox favourites Bad Company 2 and Black Ops, and FateIsInexorable clarifying that he takes his hobby seriously:

"I suppose it depends on what you classify as taking your hobby too seriously. Is attending LAN events and competing in online leagues for cash and prizes taking it too seriously?" Short answer: Yes.

We are all familiar with the circle of life though, and as we welcomed the newcomers, we bade farewell to Bloatboy, who signed off with a typically rambling missive. I think he needs to get on with more work or something.

An otherwise slow start belied what was to come, and the comments soon picked up as Uncleb3n organised the regular Thursday night Gamesblog session, this time on Gran Turismo 5. GT5 comments were yet again dominating the box, as we debated the pros and cons of Maserati, Subaru, rally courses, damage, and driving aids. TonyHayers sums up his feelings: "TVRs are what Gran Turismo is all about though. Rear wheel drive monsters, that can be driven hard."

Chatterbox car swapping was as popular as ever ? does it give you the moral high ground though?

"I'm determined not to borrow any cars to complete sections of the game. This is genuinely not a pop at any of you who are."
Uncleb3n has a pop at anyone who borrows a car.

"I killed my Camaro yesterday ? it flashed red and then my steering went. Do you want it?"
A career as a used car saleswoman probably doesn't await SerenVikity.

"Don't buy him too much Meccano. He'll end up building a huge catapult to fire giant snowballs at all his teachers."
AngryMan13 gives present-buying advice to SageSmith.

Friday

Friday was ethanol day. There is a saying that if you don't move when thinking you don't think ? something to do with staring and consciousness, eye muscles, fatigue and memory: sense but one stage before perception. The body and mind as one. When work is boredom, we stare, get tired.

Posts suggested a haze of colour and shape with no sense of what that might mean to those posting, little sense of the person doing the seeing. Bacon rolls, Berroca salts, beer and Buckfast as yellow brick roads back not to one's being but to one's self, self being the word that cheapens being, self being a word that works well with work and the demands it makes upon being, a word that denies what it is we as beings truly feel when a Gobi sniper rifle takes out a deathclaw with one shot at four hundred metres.

For one, this awful state of affairs, a Friday morning hangover, brought a self closer to God and the power of silent stoicism and a moment of prayer, albeit shared with a gamesblog with thousands of voyeurs across the world. "Dear lord I feel awful..." (Chubster, 2010, p10).

In another office, a building with walls and doors and stairs, a spreadsheet on a computer was cross fired with rows and columns: it hit a sweet spot called Smashing.

"Hell yeah! I'm feeling like crap? Thankfully I'm working at home today and will be stuffing my face and playing games? That's how you cure a hangover. Well, that and more beer."

It was a formula, if not shared, then appreciated by the legend of Sheep and the ghost of Peter Cook.

"Don't sober up.
Worked well for Peter Cook
Four cans of beer & a large vodka. Bottle of wine with lunch. Then in the afternoon he'd start drinking"

The recent discovery that bacteria in a lake in the USA have arsenic as a component of their make-up holds up hope that these days are not over.

Seren's "dip intae" the realm of new world wines paralleled a new found land for the blog ? a group of females, with guns, broke the circle and gathered round the blog fire seeking not only comfort from the pretensions of work but to share their knowledge of weaponry, FPS and general understandings of the perspectives of those with tails about those without.

The blog sent out big greetings to Wardinator and the other no tail (i apologise, it is late and i now have no brain, i know you will never forgive me for this but seriously i am without capacity) for their frank dismissal of all things princess and tamponic, despite the immediate and serious threat posed to world safety by the now recognised unregulated nature of tamponic weapons. As Albert Einstein, the man with the non-fascist moustache, noted a few years before his death, "I know not with what tamponic weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks, stones and super plus sanitary towels." [I really don't know what's going on anymore ? Keef]

Gaming wise, the talk was of two door lamb biryanis and online car shares, colour schemes a big factor.

Honourable mentions: Get better soon FoolsGold, the half-man, half-cattle bastard son of a Hearts and Hibs love affair.

[Has he finished? Is it safe to come out now? ? Keef]

Quote of the Day

"If you go back far enough, we are all descendants of the Scots.
There's no real evidence for it, but it's still a scientific fact."
Treble, 2010, p1707