all talk and no action

I don’t get hugely excited about upcoming games, because I don’t play a lot of them and when I do they seem pretty similar to other ones I’ve played, only they look a bit better. So lately my gaming time is spent playing World of Warcraft – hardly the most exciting game out there but oddly familiar and comforting, much like gardening is to some people, I’d imagine.

But I am looking forward to Team Fortress 2. I loved the first version and spent way too many evenings running around the maps dodging rockets and sniper bullets. Team Fortress 2 looks to be more of the same, but if the trailers are anything to go by, it’ll be a lot more fun – the cartoony graphics and soundtrack give it a real comedy air, moving away from the more serious YOU ARE A REAL SOLDIER approach of other games of this genre (whatever the genre is called).

I really hope the soundtrack from the trailers makes it into the game. TF2 comes out on 9 October and there are a couple of trailers at the official site. It’s the first game I’ll be pre-ordering since Half-Life 2.

OK, so it looks like my site has just gone back in time, but at least this template works and it saves me having to look for a new one and edit it to get it the way I want it. In the meantime, I've put all annual subscription fees on hold as compensation.

So this is the disadvantage of relying on a stylesheet that's externally hosted -- the link to the stylesheet changes and I lose my design. Still, maybe it's an opportunity to go hunt for a new one. Once this painful deadline is out of the way, that is.

I was never a huge fan of Friends Reunited as I’ve always been of the opinion that if there was an old school friend that I wanted to keep in touch with I either (a) kept in touch with them or (b) had a good reason not to. But as time has gone on, I’ve realised that there’s an option (c). That’s people I’d quite like to hear from but through various work, address, email and phone number changes I’d somehow lost touch with. It’s Facebook that’s reminded me of that – it’s nice to get the odd update from people I don’t often talk to, and to be able to exchange messages and keep some sort of a friendship going, however tenuous.

And that’s what’s caused me to dislike Friends Reunited even more. It makes it blindingly obvious that it’s about making money from membership fees rather than connecting people – you can’t add a Hotmail address or even mention the word Facebook in your profile. Those words are banned, and automatically deleted from your profile. So when I added “I’m on facebook if you want to get in touch”, Friends Reunited kindly changed it to “I’m on if you want to get in touch.”

It’s ridiculous and similar to a pub landlord banning customers from exchanging phone numbers, telling them that they can only talk to each other again if they come back to the pub and buy a drink. The customers, of course, will promise to return, and instead swap phone numbers in the car park before telling all their friends to avoid the place and go somewhere more welcoming. And similarly, Friends Reunited users resort to not-so-subtle ways to share their contact details. “Mail me at my name at the hot place” or, as I’ve now added, “I’m on the book of faces”.

It’s not hard to find a way around these stupid filtering systems and it can only annoy people who might pay for other services, or at least click a few banner ads. Maybe now I’ll get kicked off Friends Reunited for breaking their terms of service, or have my profile manually edited to remove the reference to Facebook, but you know what? That’s a pub I don’t want to drink in any more.

Well, that's a relief. According to Technology Review, a biotech firm reckons it will be "coaxing bacteria into producing hydrocarbons that could be processed into fuels like those made from petroleum" within three to five years.

Right, I'm off to buy a Humvee.

[via Metafilter]