It’s barely hitting 25? and I already feel like I’m going to die from the heat. At the height of the summer we’ll be closer to 40? so I’m going to have to survive by never going outside again. Ever. Too many fucking tourists in this town whining about why they can’t fuck off abroad for a holiday instead of coming to pester me about how their cigarettes cost more down here.

I would rant some more, but I’m sweating too much and typing is too much effort. I just want to watch the end of Doctor Who and then pass out.

The aforementioned person with a cursory knowledge of Batman was, in fact, my younger brother who asked a howler of a question at the end which deserves a mention all of its own. Those who don’t know the very end of Batman Begins and don’t want to read about it would do well to skip the rest of this post now.

That last scene when Lieutenant Gordon hands Batman a joker card that had been left behind by one of Arkham’s escapees with “a taste for the theatrical” is probably the most overt hint at who will be in the next film possible, and it couldn’t have been more obvious what it meant if Jack Nicholson had turned up with a white face and green hair and started laughing maniacally, as if The Joker isn’t synonymous with Batman anyway. But what did my brother say when we were leaving the cinema?

“Who was that card from at the end?”

Uh…come again?

What’s going to be worse? Uwe Boll making a Postal movie (as if the games weren’t poor enough) or Vin Diesel as Agent 47 in Hitman? This seems to be one of those questions where whoever wins, we lose. I’m sure that some people will go and see them, but don’t both the Geneva Convention and the US Constitution forbid cruel and unusual punishment? I think that necessitates a detailed enquiry into the legality of what Hollywood is doing to us here.

The announcement that Wal-Mart will be dropping support for VHS to free up space for DVD must surely be one of the final nails in the coffin of the format, and has been a long time coming. Considering that I haven’t bought a VHS tape in five years and that was only because The Phantom Menace wasn’t set for a DVD release I’m strangely sad, because it’s like witnessing the passing of an old friend.

Nobody’s likely to argue that DVD is a superior format and that it’s not even in the same league at the HD-DVD formats, but neither DVD nor HD will be as big a revolution to home entertainment as the humble VHS was. Countless modern classics (some more “classic” than others) that risked fading into obscurity found life and an audience on VHS – horror like the Evil Dead series and An American Werewolf in London, comedy like Mallrats, and, of course, The Usual Suspects. None of those did well at the box office but thanks to home video they gained followings that are almost too big to even be considered “cult” anymore.

Anyone who’s worked in entertainment retail and has seen the relative numbers of DVDs and VHS in circulation knows that the format has been living on borrowed time for a while now, but now is the time to say goodbye to the old friend and continue moving on with our technology: it was nice knowing you.

Our household went wireless today for the benefit of all the laptops in the house (all the desktops still have a nice 100Mbps wired connection) and I’ve found that ubiquity just makes the Internet become completely indispensable, even more so than it currently has. Rather than needing to swap cables around and plug things into the router I can go anywhere in the house and just jump online for whatever I want to do. No need to share share one ratty old ethernet cable between my Xbox, PS2, iBook, and PC, and I’m able to take full advantage of the wireless capabilities of upcoming consoles and handhelds.

I was having some serious reception problems with the new access point even though it only had to go through one thin wall but, as usual, it was a result of my meddling. It turned out that in the process of making various upgrades to my iBook I’d only left the Airport antenna cable halfway in. I’d spent hours trying to meddle with the placement of the access point and its ridiculously short power cable when all I’d had to do was press a cable into a hole a little harder. Story of my life…or something…

I can wax lyrical about how good being completely unwired is for ages, but the absolute greatest thing ever is that I can go online while I’m having a shit. Brings a whole new meaning to the phrase “log on and download”.

While marketers struggle to work out how the games industry hasn’t found its niche amongst the fairer sex in the way that film and popular music have, RedAssedBaboon have apparently found out exactly why not with a finished but abandoned example of casually misogynistic advertising for Juiced, surviving the cutting room floor thank to the power of the Interweb and the popularity of the controversial amongst its denizens.

Is it any surprise that female gamers are in a tiny minority with advertising like that? Even a movie aimed completely at men wouldn’t dare go that far when it comes to alienating half the population.

Still, I’m going to jump off the moral high ground and say that I found it funny.