#My Sunday Photo

A trip to West Midlands Safari Park this weekend yielded some pretty cool shots, including these two which I took:

#MySundayPhoto

A pirate's life for me!

We've been going pirate mad in this house lately. ET has had the ELC Happyland pirate ship for ages but, recently, he's been much more aware of pirates as a 'thing'. Now, I've been a bit of a pirate geek since I was a child (I even have a pirate themed tattoo!), so I'm happy to see my little landlubber taking an interest in the subject. I'm been (possibly over) encouraging this over the last week or so, so I thought I'd give you a roundup of what we'd been up to.

I hate Bing

Have you seen Bing? It's a newish CBeebies cartoon featuring a young rabbit named Bing who lives with a little stuffed animal thing named Flop who isn't his dad, but does sleep in the same bed as him. In fact, all of the 'children' are anthropomorphic animals and all of the 'adults' are stuffed toys. It's pretty weird.

Life's little worries

I regularly worry about whether or not I'm a good dad. I read somewhere that if you worry about being a good parent then you already are a good parent. There might be some truth in that, I suppose, but it doesn't stop me worrying.

Finally Finished...Final Fantasy VII

This is the first post in one of my new features, 'Finally Finished...', where I write about games I've finally finished playing. In today's hectic life it's rare I finish a game and that means some classics get left behind. Join me as I try to finally finish them.

It’s taken almost twenty years, multiple attempts across numerous platforms, but, over the Christmas period, I finally, finally finished Final Fantasy VII.

Game over - do you want to continue?

A friend got in touch earlier in the week. We haven’t seen each other in years (he moved out to Australia some time ago), but we catch up regularly to see how we’re both doing. Whilst catching up, he asked me a simple question: ‘do you still have much time for games?’. We’d known each other since we started secondary school, and gaming was an interest we’d shared ever since, from racing each other to see who could complete the original Tomb Raider fastest (and avoiding homework to do so), or going to each other’s houses to do link up Duke Nukem 3D on Playstation in the days before easy internet console gaming, to even running an internet café together where we held local Unreal Tournament and Counter Strike championships (we always won).

I can still hear the theme tune in my head....and the screams of noobs as I wasted them

Every day is a school day

Despite ET being too young to start worrying about this, people I know are currently running the gauntlet that is picking a primary school for their child. Little did I know just how difficult and stressful this could be, as children are categorised based on any number of arbitrary categories. Seriously, it'd be simpler and fairer to just give them a weapon and pit them against each other in a fight to the death, Battle Royale style.

Have you seen Battle Royale? It's like Hunger Games, only good.