Dear Nintendo

Dear Nintendo,

I am writing to apply for the position of game designer with your company. We have a chance here to help children experience games that are more true to life than any game before them. Computer graphics have improved and improved and improved, and some day soon we're going to have to ask ourselves where we can go next in our search for realism.

We need virtual pet games where you clean and feed and love your furry little friend and that car still comes out of nowhere so smoothly, a god of aerodynamics and passenger safety. Where you hear your father's quiet joke that night, when he thinks you are asleep.

We need a new Mario game, where you rescue the princess in the first ten minutes, and for the rest of the game you try and push down that sick feeling in your stomach that she's "damaged goods", a concept detailed again and again in the profoundly sex negative instruction booklet, and when Luigi makes a crack about her and Bowser, you break his nose and immediately regret it. When Peach asks you, in the quiet of her mushroom castle bedroom "do you still love me?" you pretend to be asleep. You press the A button rhythmically, to control your breath, keep it even.

We need an airport simulator, where the planes carry your whole family from A to B, job to job, and dad still drinks in the shower and your older sister still has casual sex that she confides might bring back a feeling she's certain she didn't imagine. Where the plane touches down and you all lean forward in your seats because of inertia, and again and again someone says "I hate to fly".

Yours,

Joey Comeau 

- Joey Comeau, Overqualified (2009)

Dawn On The Avenue De Boavista

It's dawn now in Porto, and I'm the only one still awake. I first turned the data back on on my mobile phone just after 22:00 last night. I did it in a "Give it to me straight, doctor" mood, and found some positive news. It's just been announced that there's a hung parliament.

I've no idea what's about to happen, or whether the people I've given my conditional support to over the last two years will gravely let me down or lead to disaster.

What interests me, though, is how wrong all the Smart Boys who went to a grammar school, or an expensive private school , and maybe then Oxbridge were. After all, those educations made their ideas intrinsically More Serious than those of someone who went to the state school down the road, and less elite univesities. That's the natural order of things.

Don't expect to see too much discussion of that over the next few days, though.