I went to a meeting with a PR firm that’s working on the PSP for its European launch today.

As I assumed, they’re playing the cool-culture card rather than the gaming one. I didn’t really expect the PRs to know much about gaming in general but they hardly mentioned the games at all. The only specific game that was mentioned at all was WipeOut, and that was in relation to a project where music by “up and coming young urban music acts” would be downloadable for the game. Rather than the games, they’re accentuating the media capabilities of the PSP.

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Coupla random things: could this be the new Boggle? (pity the bank of different words isn’t very extensive but great nonetheless)

And a dear friend has invented a new thing: book covers to hide your shame at what you’re reading. Simply download and print, and you no longer need be afraid to read your Dan Brown, or indeed Philip Roth, in public again.

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Google is updating its news searches to order news stories in terms of their “quality”, using stats like the number of staff on the publication, website traffic and story length.

News is at least meant to be more objective than most other forms of writing, but it remains absolutely subjective, and we should remember that. I suppose Google will be able to make the searches generally meaningful and practical, but do we really want everything we do ordered like that? What happens when we start assuming such subjective things as news stories are objective (like Daily Mail news stories…)? What if Google’s efficient clockwork achieves its apparent ambition of making us forget the web’s real identity as a glorious sprawl of mostly worthless and occasionally wonderful human endeavour?

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I read Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf recently and thought it was absolutely amazing. I actually bought it at least a year ago in a fit of pique on a visit to Sutton Hoo and predictably never got around to reading it for fear of unpenetrable verse. But my fears were totally allayed because it read incandescently fresh. And it’s one of those great elemental, basic, essential stories.

Anyway, on listening to a bit of Fugazi on the train home tonight I feel that should I ever film Beowulf (just imagine that! Hey, it’s not such an outlandish idea anyway, as films and TV are surely the modern equivalent of the travelling bard) I would use Fugazi’s Arpeggiator off End Hits at top volume throughout the scene of the celebration at killing Grendel. Apart from being a brilliantly rip-roaring song, that baseline seems to encapsulate Beowulf’s themes of inevitable rise and fall, birth and death, glory and lament.

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It’s still a pleasurable shock to find pieces of writing that thoughtfully consider games as intrinsic and valuable parts of present-day culture. I’ve read a couple just this week: Games in the favela is a short but very sweet account of encountering games arcades in favelas (though you may well have guessed that from the title). Videogames offer glorious alternate realities to local kids who’d otherwise have a good chance of being recruited into the drug gangs:

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icon 010 A funny one, this was. I wanted to review this book about climbing about on classic bits of LA architecture (many of which were in Los Angeles Plays Itself), but my editor was so taken with it that he immediately decided that it should be a feature. Though it was hard to write I found it highly enjoyable, though I’m not so sure it ultimately actually says all that much about anything.

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Poor old Gizmondo – either totally unknown or heavily criticised, it seems to have little chance of surviving in the marketplace alongside the DS and PSP. Especially with that name…

We were passing its “flagship” shop (there’s only one of them, afterall) on Regent Street and had a quick look in today. Much as reports have suggested that the shop hasn’t exactly been raking in the sales, there were actually quite a few people in there playing on the many demo units. It was hardly full, and the many suited sales staff were hardly rushed off their feet, but it was certainly bustling. Yeah, that’s the word.

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Wow. Having done geography at university I love maps but this is one of the most incredible maps I’ve ever used.

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I agree with Game Girl Advance. That said, I picked one up for the first time yesterday in a Tottenham Court Road electronics shop. They’re all doing the Japanese PSP for £250 and I was sorely tempted. It really is gorgeous – Ridge Racer looked beautiful – even if I still can’t see a game on the horizon that is truly interesting in the way that DS games are promising and proving to be.

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There are incredible differences between names given to babies in black and white families in California.

“Today, more than 40 percent of the black girls born in California in a given year receive a name that not one of the roughly 100,000 baby white girls received that year. Even more remarkably, nearly 30 percent of the black girls are given a name that is unique among every baby, white and black, born that year in California.”

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