It does exactly what it says on the tin – it’s 79 short-essays (essentially blog posts) on a wide variety of issues, truths, myths and experiences as seen through the eyes of Michael Bierut. This is one of the best design books I’ve read regardless of it’s short, quickfire attitude – or maybe perhaps because of. In fact, I might even have to be so bold as to say this is one of the best books I’ve ever read.

It’s full of small smiles and head-nodding agreement moments, and this book managed to say more about the world of design in its first title of the first essay (Warning: May Contain Non-Design Content) than most design books manage to say in 200 beautifully laid out pages.

There’s no excuse for not buying this one. Quick, dirty, and full of home truths, this is an essential book for anyone.

Ben Terrett loved it too.

I usually find horror films pretty samey. They follow the same tired formula that the genre followed from about 50 years ago, with no attempt to bring something fresh to each new film. If there’s one genre that’s saturated with shit out there, it’s this one. I thought the same about 28 Days Later. It’s just another horror film. Sure, it attempted to be a little original, but it just didn’t wash with me. So what’s changed with the sequel?

To be honest, everything. Apart from the location, everything is just better. Unusual for a horror film, 28 Weeks Later starts with a bang – a house getting ransacked by lots of people who has the zombie, sorry, Rage disease. One of the best parts of the opening is the camera angles, mainly because they’re all over the place and do a good job of giving a genuine feel of tension to the film. When a character in the film is filling their pants with brown stuff, you’ll know because it will be conveyed through the shaky camera angles. It’s a nice touch that adds a little bit extra atmosphere to the film.

Undoubtedly though, the one thing that creates the biggest atmosphere in this film is the location. Seeing London completely empty is all the atmosphere this film needs. It’s not just one street either: it’s sweeping, city-wide camera work showing the whole place empty. Luckily 28 Weeks Later doesn’t play on this camera angle too much, and because of that each time it happens you’ll feel shocked at the sheer emptiness of it all. To top it all off, it just looks 100% real. There hasn’t been a film that I could suspend my belief from for a long time, but this is definitely it now.

Creepy, atmospheric, and probably the best horror film I’ve ever seen, 28 Weeks Later deserves your attention right NOW. Don’t let the first one put you off, because this is one of those rare cases where the second is better than the first.

Like the first one? Then you’ll be blown away by this.

From my first ever phone (the Motorola vBox) to 2 weeks ago, I’ve always hated my mobile phone. I’ve tried to love them, and I’ve had some mobile phones in the past that I should have loved. The P900 was pretty special, and it was chocked full of a thousand different applications. This was a PDA masquerading as a mobile phone, but after a while I got sick of its stupid interface and I just wanted a phone again. This experience has characterised my entire mobile phone-using history. Buy fancy phone, get sick of awkward interface, and buy a smaller and less complicated mobile phone.

Fast forward to now, and I’ve just got sick of the P1i (ridiculously complicated interface), and I was on the market for a new mobile phone. Instead of following my usual pattern of buying a simplistic phone after a disappointing phone, I bought the iPhone.

As regular readers will know, I’ve resisted the temptation of an iPhone for a while, instead opting for its little brother; the iPod Touch. I’d had the Touch for about six months, and when I realised that I still loved that gorgeously simple interface six months later, I knew I was onto something unusually special, and I knew I had to buy an iPhone.

So, let’s get the bad bits of the iPhone out of the way first – the texting takes some getting used to, you can’t put it in your pocket with anything else for fear of damaging it, you have to use iPod headphones unless you have an adapter, and the speaker when talking to people sounds a bit crackly when it’s turned up loud. Other than that, every else is perfect.

And I genuinely mean that. Whilst much of the iPhone’s interface won’t wow you, everything is just built to make your life easier. Text messages are organised by recipient instead of message, and messages are show as conversations in little speech bubbles, showing your replies and their replies. If you’re doing something on your phone and a text comes in, the text will appear in full over the top of whatever you are doing, giving you an option to either reply or ignore. Setting an alarm is as easy as turning a wheel, because you literally turn a wheel to set it. Everything on the iPhone is laid out in such a way so that you never have to think about how you need to do what you want to do.

And then there’s the amazing extras it manages to shove in there too. The music player is just the iPod Touch stuck into the iPhone, so that’s nigh-on perfect. Usually when you hear the words mobile phone application you’ll immediately think of a slightly cut down version of the bigger application that doesn’t work as well, but here there is a fully-fledged iPod.

Next on the list is the utterly amazing Safari browser, which is by far the best portable internet browser I have ever used. What makes it so good is the fact that pages are rendered as they would be using the desktop version of Safari, apart from they’re zoomed out to fit the iPhone’s screen. You can then double tap any area to zoom in, or use the fancy pinch feature. The best thing about zooming in is all the text is smoothed, so no matter how close you zoom in the text looks just as good as it would zoomed right out.

But forget all of the iPhone’s fancy features for a second. The only thing that really matters is this: the iPhone is a joy to use no matter what you are doing with it. Sending a text message becomes a screen filled with colourful bubbles. Viewing photos becomes a game of sliding your finger around the screen, and pinching it to zoom in. If you were to buy one right now, I can personally guarantee that you wouldn’t be disappointed. That’s how good the iPhone is.

The iPhone is so much more than just a mobile phone, and it almost feels a crime to call it that. You’ll never look at a mobile the same way again.

Betcha.

A final note
Before you start thinking I’m an Apple fanboy and I’m just praising the product because I love Apple, then let me tell you this: I’m extremely difficult to please when it comes to interfaces on anything, especially mobile phones. This is the first and only mobile phone that I have actually found a pleasure to use.

Well, I say much. Maybe they’ve changed a little. I guess my problem has been that I’ve been spoiled with Splinter Cell for far two long – especially Double Agent – and I found it difficult at first to admit to myself that yes, it wasn’t no Splinter Cell, but Metal Gear Solid was never meant to be.

But lord, all that rambling on is soul-destroying. Somehow, I’ve been able to put up with it in my younger years when I didn’t understand much of the words being used, but in my older age I cottoned on to the fact that yes, every character does speak utter bullshit.

But no matter. It’s all about the story as a whole right? Well, it’s meant to be, but what we’ve got here is a story more ridiculous than a joint-writing process between M. Night Shyamalan and Tenacious D.

So maybe the characters are something you can warm to? Well, you’ve got Old Snake, who miraculously– despite having developed some sort of age-accelerating disease – manages to look not a day older than what he probably should do. The Colonel is back, though apparently he’s a shoe-shiner now or something and most definitely not your colonel so stop calling him that. And completing The Same Old Team is Otacon, everybody’s favourite geek. Beyond those three main characters, old Hideo takes a somewhat kitchen sink approach to character introductions, i.e. he introduces every last one that has ever been in a Metal Gear Solid game. You certainly can’t accuse Hideo of not wrapping up his stories.

However, the kitchen sink approach does have one minor flaw: it manages to make the game even more confusing than it already is. Yes, Kojima has managed the previously-thought impossibility of making his MGS even more confusing. And in the end, you just feel like you’re moving from one level to the next, not having a clue of why you’re there and why you should bother.

If this game was anything other than Metal Gear Solid though, I would have left it right there. I would have left it on a negative note, letting you think that I hate this new instalment. But you know what? Despite all its flaws, despite its ridiculous story and despite the fact that it’s more stuck in its ways than a 98 year old, I love MGS4.

I think it’s nostalgia. There’s no other excuse. Don’t get me wrong, MGS4 is by no means a bad game to play, but it’s far from the genre-leader that it once was. It’s enjoyable for a length of time, but the reason you’ll stick with this until the end is because you want to see what happens to Snake and the other 2 billion characters.

Truth is, I could have said anything in this review and it wouldn’t have made a blind bit of difference to your opinion. You’ve probably already bought it. The bottom line is this: if you’re a fan of MGS, you’ve got to play this, and you probably already are doing.

If you’re not a fan, then you’re very lucky indeed. Like a big fat chocolate cake, MGS4 is so wrong, but somehow – by some sort of divine intervention combined with blind conviction in its storytelling – brilliant at the same time.