“Sarcastrophe” is a good start. Hard to be negative about “The Negative One”. “Custer” made me giggle.

On the whole, Slipknot do very little good here. They were always Insane Clown Posse with guitars, so I’m glad they’ve reverted to the fruity, unpretentious style of S/T thru to Vol 3 (or perhaps you’d prefer to hear their opinions about the Iraq war). But the songs aren’t catchy or interesting. This is a big problem.

Most of them ride predictable Machine Head-inspired groove riffs and double bass flurries – this is the type of album that make you feel like a sorcerer because you can predict exactly what will come next. Others attempt emotion and land with a splash in boredom.

“Approaching Original Gayness” (or whatever) sounds like “Before I Forget” with a sugary clean-sung chorus tacked on in a way that doesn’t make sense. Lead single “The Devil in I” starts out with an animated uptempo riff, then slows down and immediately starts spiralling the toilet. Boring idea after boring idea. I hate this song.

“Skeptic” is a tribute to bassist Paul Gray, who recently caught a bad case of dead. It has a cute chorus and not much else. “Goodbye” is long and tedious, speeding up and slowing down seemingly at random. If this song was an actual “goodbye” it would be an unwanted houseguest you’re trying to shoo out and who keeps trying to tell you his life story. Shut up already. Save it for your memoir. No, I won’t read it there, either.

At times the album barely sounds finished. The songs change from section to section haphazardly, and the tracklisting induces further whiplash. “Custer” and “The Negative One” have a nearly identical screech sample and a similar breakdown chorus…and they’re separated by just a 2 minute interlude. It’s like listening to the same song twice.

The occasional interesting riff and energetic moment keeps things moving forward and patches over the bad moments somewhat. This is their first album without Joey “needs a stepping stool to reach the drumkit” Jordison, which was a turn for the better. Judging from Scar the Martyr, he was responsible for the band’s self-serious period. But the band doesn’t exactly return to form, either, mostly because Slipknot never really had a “form” to return to.

A few entertaining moments. At least 40 minutes of narcolepsy inducing crap. All hail Slipknot.

Wanna live dangerously? Play a PC game from 1990-1995 that has “2” in the title.

Companies used to have almost no idea of what a sequel to a computer game should look like. Should they be like level packs? Should they be entirely new games? The “shareware” model further complicated things – you’d have part 1, the free version, and parts 2 and 3, which you paid for. Publishers were cutting up and slicing games like lunatic sushi chefs, and “sequel” could mean absolutely anything.

Doom 2 was part of the problem. It has 32 new levels, one new weapon, and a few new enemies. Do you call that a sequel? I call it a glorified level pack. Some accountancy particulars set Doom 2 apart from the original (chiefly the fact that it was sold in stores rather than through mail-order), but so what? Imagine if Street Fighter II was Street Fighter I with a new character and some new backgrounds. You’d call shenanigans.

The new weapon is the super shotgun. It’s very satisfying to clear a room of zombies in one blast, but it disrupts the balance of the game. It’s just too effective – you never again use the regular shotgun, so why still have it in the game? (Yes, the shotgun has a tighter spread and is better for long-range fighting, but the chaingun’s better in that category).

The new enemies are a little mixed. The pain elementals and revenants are just tedious and annoying, no fun to fight. The chaingun zombies are neat. The arch-vile is the most inspired creation: a “healer” that can revive dead enemies. All the old enemies are back, including a fair few cyberdemons. At one point you have to face a cyberdemon and mastermind at the same time (the battle becomes anticlimactic when you realise you can trick them into killing each other).

The new levels are the meat of the game. Most of them are either designed by Romero or Peterson. Romero’s levels are aesthetically beautiful, and actually evoke the feeling that you’re in hell. Peterson’s are ugly, slapdash, and gimmicky. The contrasting approach to level design gives the game a bipolar feel – Romero actually gets what Doom’s about (bringing the atmosphere of a Cronenberg film to your computer screen), while Peterson is intent on dragging id Software back to the arcades.

There’s not much to say about Doom 2. If you liked the original game, this has more of the same. But it doesn’t push the envelope. The envelope remains super-glued to the table. If you’re new to the series, you might as well start with Doom 2. Once you have the super shotgun, it’s awfully hard to play a game without it.

But normally the genre-defining classics and the cheap cash-ins are made by different people. Who would have thought that in this case they’d be coming from the same studio?

This piece by Douglas Hofstadter was funny, but I don’t agree. I think common usage is the king, and people should only contravene the king’s orders under dire circumstances. I also don’t agree with Vihart’s tweet that “Gender neutral pronouns have failed again, and again, and again… which means they have the persistence to someday succeed.” So the more I fail, the more likely I am to succeed? Doesn’t sound mathematically rigorous. The English language changes to whatever form it wants, nobody can predict it, and none of those changes are intrinsically better or worse – the Grimm’s Shift of ancient times was no different to the “ebonics” of today. Just a mutation that seems to have survived.

But if we were able to redesign the English language to be as convenient as possible, what would we do?

Graphological changes

– Make every character unique – no mirrors or flips. Make it impossible to mistake b for backwards d, or M for upside down W.

– Rearrange the alphabet so that commonest letters are at the front, and less used letters are at the back. There’s no reason the alphabet should run A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I-J-K-L-M-N-O-P-Q-R-S-T-U-V-W-X-Y-Z instead of E-T-A-O-I-N-S-R-H-D-L-U-C-M-F-Y-W-G-P-B-V-K-X-Q-J-Z. Maybe then we won’t call it the alphabet, we’ll call it the epsilontau.

– Optimise the English script for handwriting. Make it so that x (for example) can be written with one stroke – perhaps by connecting the two lines with an arch.

Linguistic changes

– Incorporate Japanese’s honorifics. They’re useful as hell. They let you add trick out sentences out with emotion and color and nuance. “Yes, Spongebob-sama” is a nearly the opposite of “Yes, Spongebob-chan.”

– Add some pronoun modifiers so we can tell multiple people of the same gender apart. You want effective anti-gay therapy? Imagine giving yourself an embolism trying to puzzle out gay erotica (“He pressed him closer and ran his teeth over his neck…”). Maybe call the subject him1 and people in further proximity him2, him3, etc.

– Fix “w” so that it isn’t three syllables long. Have you ever tried to give someone a website address and had your mouth block up with dubya-dubya-dubyas like a jammed printer? This article suggests a pronounciation of “wu”.

– Remove the indefinite article, like Greek does. And if we get get away without the definitive article, so much the better. I hate a‘s and the‘s sitting in between the real words. Somehow they cause my trypophobia to flare up.