Occasional Tales

 What? That’s it? The new series started well. The Eventlab tiles weren’t working, the Forzathon shop wouldn’t load, and Rivals had com­plete­ly vanished. Yes, we’re back to this sort of thing. I did as much as I could without restarting and still managed to unlock the Nissan Z. Everything was working after a quick break from the game, and I unlocked the 80% car. But I looked at the progress bar and felt that the week was over. I’ll still do the dailies, but only towards the over­all total because for the first time in a month, there’s another missing exclusive, viz. the 2020 Nissan GT-R, which is another car that I lost from clicking on the reset button in August last year. I tried the Nissan Z (A800) this evening. Understeery. It’s like an updated 370Z and, er… It’s nice to see a con­temporary car, but this one appears to have nothing to overly recommend it. The second expansion. “It must be Lego because there are Lego cars in the video,” concluded no one in­tel­li­gent ever. Wel...

The winning combination. Unless you’re 18-24, comparatively well off, and educated. It seems a bit pointless to say something about the referendum, but why not? The country seems to have shot itself in the foot – with a howitzer. My prediction was for us to remain in Europe, but not by much of a margin, but it was clear, even from the early results, that the Leave campaign had won the match. I also predicted that some people would simply see this as a protest vote, deciding that if David Cameron said one thing, they should do the other. Mind you, when I found myself aligned with him or that ghastly squit, George Osborne, I almost felt compelled to switch sides. The problem is that by using this as a protest, people really have blasted both feet off because they’re not going to wake up some day soon and find their lives have improved because Brussels is no longer allegedly interfering in their lives, or because the Tories give any more of a damn than they did in the first...

The new version. After several days of reasonable good service, the forces of ignorance seem to have been trying their hardest to strangle my Internet assistant. However, this afternoon, I managed to get the latest version, and things seem to be fairly steady at the moment. Once again, I’m able to see the real Internet as I ought to be able to see it. If the Chinese want to stick their heads in the sand and their government want them to stick their heads in the sand, they’re welcome to wallow in their ignorance. In fact, there’s something disturbingly wrong with countries whose governments are so obsessed with keeping their citizens so ignorant. In China it’s because the government is obsessed with keeping power at all costs; though because the population is so zombie-like already, they could unblock most of the Internet, and it wouldn’t, I believe, make any real difference. The number of people who hate blocks on Facebook, YouTube and other non-porn sites is, I suspect, tiny. I...