Image by Damien Lopez

I’m currently making my way through Jesper Juul’s “A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players” and I came across this useful diagram.  It is missing a few entries, but overall its quite handy for reference (and nostalgia).

Its great when you have a girlfriend who knows you well…

…and the geekiest is yet to come!

A pretty excellent post from Cracked.com, with pictures showing what games would be like if they followed the rules of reality a  bit more closely…

Read the full post at Cracked.com to see more hilarious Photoshops.

Yesterday was an absolutely beautiful day, one that seems so far removed from the absolutely crap weather we had for most of the summer.  Clare and I travelled up the coast to the Giant’s Causeway.  I took a few snaps – the place is gorge-ous as always.

More rocks.

Last night I got back from Majorca.  We stayed in Palma Nova, which was a great place with nice people and plenty of sunshine!  We also checked out Magaluf – a bit more lively but a bit less respectable, though great if you’re in the party mood.  I’ve uploaded plenty of photos and some videos to my Flickr account.  You can check out the full set here.  Here are some highlights:

And finally, how brilliant is this sand castle fortress we seen on the Palma Nova beach?  Breathtaking skills and attention to detail:

Majorca 2009 on Flickr.

The New Xbox Experience launched yesterday and this was the avatar I made for myself.  The hairstyle customisation is a bit lacking – where’s the messy stupid hair look?

I’ve uploaded a load of photos from Portugal to my Flickr.  Today is the first day of the ICDVRAT conference (good to know we have free wireless!), so I may post some stuff about that later.

Today was rather great weather-wise for a winters day: clear blue skies, warm sunshine, dry ground. Its got me completely in the mood for summer sunshine, and craving those sweet 2 weeks in the summer where nothing really matters. God knows if the weather will actually be good during those 2 weeks though. It also got me in the mood to flick through some of my photos on Flickr, reminding me that, as much as I usually loathe my local surroundings, there are parts that can be pretty damn beautiful in the right light. Bring on the sunshine!

PS. The images look some of their crispness in the blog-conversion process.  Click the images for better quality and larger versions.

Derry/Londonderry quay

Harvey’s Point, Donegal

Altahullion Wind Farm, Limavady

Enjoying flying a kite on Benone beach

More photos on my Flickr page.

This morning, doing my usual Sunday morning TV surf, I started watching Jeremy Clarkson’s Extreme Machines on that Freeview channel Dave (odd name for a channel). Anyway, towards the end of the show Clarkson was walking through an airplane scrapyard in Arizona. I thought I’d do a search and find it on Google Earth, since it’d pretty obviously be rather easy to see from a satellite. Thanks to GoogleEarthCoolPlaces.com, I found it prettily easily.

You can check it out on Google Earth here. Its pretty crazy to think all those craft are just sitting idle there in a mass graveyard of once airborne metal.

So as promised, here’s some photos from Berlin, September 2007…