The News - Full of Potential...

My major distraction this week has been Google Reader.

It’s essentially a feed manager, meaning that instead of visiting all of your favourite websites, you can have all of the news sent to the same place. That wouldn’t be so bad except for the fact that it’s not enough just to add your favourite websites. You have to click the tab marked ‘browse for stuff’ and check out the bundles.

A bundle is a list of feeds organised by topic and they’ve got a bundle for everything from Bible to Board Games. Of course, when the label happens to be ‘Funny’ or ‘Fun’, you can’t help but add these, if only to satisfy your cynicism.

After about 45 minutes sorting through Humor, I opened up Humour. After another hour, I decided that the internet isn’t as funny as it thinks it is, but by then, it was bedtime.

So that was a day.

Once that first period of infomania has subsided, you see that it’s hard enough to track news on the websites you actually like, so you unsubscribe from all of the bundles and you start from scratch.

I decided to be a grown-up about it and added the Times news, The Guardian world news, the NME news and the Evening Standard entertainment news.

To get a broad spectrum.

Before I started reading any news, I renamed the feeds and organised them in an intricate folder system. That took a good fifteen minutes after which I decided that I’d worked hard enough on the news and it was time to take a break.

I checked out xkcd.com to see if it was still as funny as I remembered it. It was the same as always, it made me laugh even though I didn’t understand it. Try it out sometime, xkcd, it’s a ‘webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.’ (That’s right, I’m on wikipedia).

About an hour later, I had another look at my news feed. 125 new posts had been added and it left me wondering if I really gave a damn about the news. I marked everything read, just to give myself a false sense of achievement, and played Boxhead - The Zombie Wars on crazymonkeygames.com.

If you’re looking for a really entertaining way to waste your time, the latest instalment in the Boxhead series is the way to go.

You play a sort of Lego man who has to survive for as long as possible while waves of Lego zombies attack from all corners. You have the usual access to many weapons, unlocking more powerful ones as your score goes up, but they’ve added a few new toys.

In The Zombie Wars, if you’re fast enough, you can build a fortress around your Lego man with the new range of gun turrets and watch wave after wave get torn up in a rain of rancid blood while you point at the screen, laughing. The drawback to this is that by the time you have to face a zombie, they are now so powerful that your Lego man gets wiped out in no time.

It’s hard to resist hitting the retry button out of sheer vengeance.

So there you have it.

The News - full of potential, but not as much fun as reading comics or killing zombies.