Lie.

It really is that simple. Don’t bother spending many weeks fine-tuning your algorithms and massaging data. Just lie. And as we’re British, you really need to be pessimistic, because while Brits love a good moan, they’re secretly happier when bad things turn out good. For example, the following would be the wrong path for you to take:

• Prediction: heatwave and lots of “cor, what a scorcher!” headlines. Reality: like this summer.

What happened there is you told people the UK will get a summer and the reality is it didn’t get one. Net result: the bad summer is all your fault, weather forecaster. You somehow jinxed it with your scientific powers. Much better to take this route:

• Prediction: mediocre summer, with a lot of cloud and rain, with temperatures at or slightly below average.

Now, if the weather follows the pattern from the past few years, this will be accurate, and you’ll be hailed as some kind of weather genius, despite not having done any actual work. Yay you. If, by some small miracle, the UK actually gets a summer and people end up lobster red and baking in an utterly ungainly manner, in only the way Brits can, well, who cares? Things were better than you predicted, so no-one’s going to blame you. They’ll be too busy slapping aloe vera on their sunburn.

If you need to get more detailed, feel free to copy and paste the following to your research papers and websites. I’m sure it’s at least 50 per cent accurate, despite me typing it up while distractedly playing Strategery on my iPad.

Totally accurate long-range UK weather forecast for 2012

• January: Look, it’s winter, so it’s going to be cold. It’ll probably also snow a bit, causing the UK to grind to a standstill in shock and surprise, despite being a country in the north of Europe, where it tends to snow. There will, however, be sunny periods, most notably near to sunset, blinding drivers countrywide who thought “well, it’s January, so I won’t need any sunglasses in the car today”.
• February: See January.
• March: Winter’s done, so summer will do a quick sneak attack to see how well-prepared Brits are for heat. Within 24 hours, the weather will, at some random point, go from “brr, it’s a bit nippy” to “OMG HOTTER THAN THE MED!” Most people will turn off their heating, whereupon the sneak attack will withdraw. Most weather forecasters will now also predict a 1976-style heatwave summer, but you know better than that, don’t you?
• April: A mixture of coolish showers and quite nice sunny days. Since Easter holidays are at the start of April, predict with 99 per cent confidence that the nicer weather will start immediately after the kids return to school.
• May: Grey.
• June: Summer will try to get started rather like someone attempting to fire up an old, battered motorbike. You’ll think it’s going to fire, and it almost will. But then it will sadly die. By the end of the month, it will be slightly cooler and wetter than everyone would hope for, with clouds lurking menacingly.
• July: Because of the ‘jet stream’ and ‘high pressure in the wrong place’ and ‘low solar maximums’ and ‘sky genies’, the Atlantic will throw all its awful weather the UK’s way like a stroppy child flinging snot at a wall. There will be a glimmer of sunny weather the day before the kids break up from school, after which the weather will attempt to drown the entire British population by raining as much as possible.
• August: Cool, grey and rainy, bar in the evenings when it’ll annoyingly get quite nice and sunny right before sunset.
• September: People will want an ’Indian summer’; they’ll get the end of a ‘British summer’. In other words, see August, but a bit cooler.
• October through December: As autumn turns to winter, it’ll get colder. Now and again, the sun will arrive for a quick look, which will make the nights very cold indeed. In December, it will snow. A lot. Dear Royal Mail: please make note of this last point, rather than acting all surprised that it snows in December and that people tend to send a lot of mail in December.

Totally accurate long-range UK weather forecast for 2013

• See “Totally accurate long-range UK weather forecast for 2012″.

iPhone Games Just Aren’t Any Fun

Maybe not, but this teardown is sure going to be.

I can’t count how many demos or $1 games I’ve bought since I got an iPod Touch back in 2008. Every day I was looking for new games to try out, be it on the poorly-organized App Store charts or on mobile gaming-dedicated websites. If it was free or cheap and looked half-way decent, I’d add it to my Touch and keep it around for a rainy day, or a slow day at work.

I downloaded lots of games, but only free or cheap ones, and, as everyone knows, every other system’s best games are the ones that are free or cheap!

Puzzle games, adventure games, RPG’s, Angry Birds. They all provided minutes of fun. And then I’d delete them.

I have the attention span of a — SQUIRREL!

Download a demo. Play it for a life/round/minute. Delete.

Also, I have zero staying power, because I’m not invested in the games. Tsk, eh?

Download a $1 game. Get the point. Delete. Actually have some increment of fun playing something. Never come back to it again. Delete.

Strangely, I never thought that maybe I was downloading the wrong games.

I don’t want to do it anymore. I’m sick of it. These ‘experiences,’

I like scare-quotes. They enable me to belittle iOS games really easily.

many based off similar ‘experiences’ from other companies selling similar Apps, are lifeless. Sure, Tiny Wings is beautiful to look at, but after getting to level 6 and having the sun set, I stop caring.

Also, those classic, highly focussed arcade games, such as Robotron, Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Defender and Missile Command? All rubbish.

Sonic the Hedgehog? Sorry, touch-screen controls for platformers can disappear along with the US economy. Hero of Sparta made me both stop caring AND curse the controls at the same time.

For some reason, I thought games specifically designed for other systems would work well on the touchscreen. In other news, my microwave is rubbish for frying eggs.

To be blunt, iPhone games aren’t fun.

To be blunt, I AM TEH HARDCORE GAMER!

When I look at my iPod Touch as a gaming device, I throw up in my mouth a little bit. It’s not a gaming device.

I’m slightly obsessed about the ‘hardcore gamer’ thing. And a little weird.

It’s a music player.

If we ignore every other app than ‘iPod’ and ‘Spotify’.

If it was an iPhone, it would be a music player and a phone.

If we ignore every other app than ‘iPod’ and ‘Spotify’ and ‘Phone’.

I have used it for games, or rather, tried to use it for games, for over three years now, and not once have I experienced my ‘Tetris Moment’ (Gameboy) or my ‘Lumines Moment’ (PSP) or my ‘Advance Wars Moment’ (GB Advance). That moment when all that the system is and can be is absorbed into your brain. It’s a moment of brilliance which is rare, and after three years of trying to find it amidst the mass of pointless, moronic, copycat, or just plain impossible-to-control ‘games’ on the iPhone platform, I’m done looking for it.

There are no good games for the iPhone at all.

No more wasted time trying to find a diamond in the rough.

Every other system has 100 per cent great games. Phew!

It’s beyond a needle in a haystack now. The App Store is a wasteland that I no longer feel the need to trudge through. There’s so many things wrong with it that the occasional mildly-amusing cheap game that I may be missing won’t matter.

I hate the future.

I’m going to make a prediction: games on the App Store will suffer their own market collapse at some point in the next five years.

PAGING JOHN GRUBER AND HIS CLAIM-CHOWDER MACHINE! PAGING JOHN GRUBER AND HIS CLAIM-CHOWDER MACHINE!

Be it through lack of innovation or consumer indifference, the store will cease to be the money-printer it is right now.

PAGING JOHN GRUBER AND HIS CLAIM-CHOWDER MACHINE! PAGING JOHN GRUBER AND HIS CLAIM-CHOWDER MACHINE!

How many times can people pay $1 for a game they’ve already downloaded fifty times under a different title?

No other games company and system ever recycles IP.

How many in-game lives must be lost to horrible touch-controls that can only be rectified by actual buttons?

I don’t understand multitouch, nor how to avoid games with rubbish virtual controls.

How many minutes must be wasted downloading and installing the next mini-game, only to delete it minutes later because you’ve seen all there is to see?

The Civilisation series is rubbish—there’s just this guy, standing on a field, surrounded by inky blackness. I DELETED IT RIGHT AWAY.

My time is more valuable than that.

Yet not valuable enough that I can’t spend some time writing a poorly thought-out rant about iOS gaming.

I’m not against indie games, or even spirited re-imaginations of existing games

Unless they’re on the iPhone.

but I am against the devaluation of games as fun.

Because if you ignore the thousands of fun iOS games with plenty of depth, there are no fun iOS games with plenty of depth.

The iPhone is a great device (when people don’t drive with it), and kudos to Apple for innovating in a space that had become stagnant with boring cell handsets, but games shall no longer grace my iPod Touch, or my iPhone if I ever get one.

I’m a gamer. I play real games. On real systems.

REAL MEN USE BUTTONS! AND PLASTIC CARTRIDGES! AND PAY OVER THE ODDS FOR BOTH!

In Mac OS X, Apple went a bit more corporate, with its logo ousting the wee Happy Mac, who was, presumably, shot in the head, as is the Cupertino way. Now, according to MacRumors, our chum is back, albeit in the shape of iCloud’s error messages, thereby proving one of two things:

1. Apple did indeed shoot Happy Mac to death and he’s now in digital heaven, but, shockingly, still under contract. *SADFACE*
2. Apple merely beat Happy Mac into the shape of a cloud, and now even forces him to wear stupid glasses and smile for the camera. FOR SHAME, STEVE JOBS!

• Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) will be demoed further. Apple pundits will bitch and complain about how the new features are rubbish, pointless, stupid and smell a bit of wee. These same pundits will then be writing up features and tutorials about how UNICORN AMAZING said features are, approximately fourteen seconds after they’ve had a chance to play with them themselves.
• iOS 5 will be revealed, with a number of features that improve Apple’s mobile platform immeasurably. However, because Apple won’t include features that tech pundits want, iOS 5 will be widely slammed, despite appealing more to consumers. Also, iOS 5 will in some way include features that bear a little resemblance to things Android can already do. This will cause an Android-user smugness overload on the internet, countered by an Apple fan-boy whinealanche that will cause almost half of the internet to CATCH FIRE.
• Analysts will react to the keynote by claiming their predictions, which were almost the exact opposite of what was revealed, were in fact the same as what was revealed, and will happily continue making up bullshit and getting paid for it. Forever.
• Apple is doomed will be a common theme, due to the company missing out the one thing a prominent tech pundit wanted to see in Lion or iOS 5, and also for not releasing devices that the competition are making but that themselves will in the long run be doomed to failure. Apple, naturally, will only remain doomed in the press, while making more money every second than you could stuff down your pants, even if you have really big, baggy pants.
• Apple will take down its entire store, just to fuck with people’s heads. With any luck, it will come back up, with only a single price-change to one product: the price of the Digital AV Adapter, down by a single Euro, and only in the Belgian store.
• Most people will be disappointed with whatever Apple announces, because most people believe the hype and don’t appreciate how stunning the technology we have is, and even how fantastic the incremental updates we’re getting are. As this YouTube video says, everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy. START BEING HAPPY. NOW.

Reckon I’ll be six-for-six this year.

* My brain, which doesn’t have a name, and is therefore thoroughly jealous of my kneecaps, Arthur and Gerald.

OK, so it might look a smidge like the MacBook Air, but here’s why Lenovo’s laptop will grind Apple’s into the dirt:

• Nipple: Everyone likes a nipple, and this laptop still has one wedged into its keyboard. Apple seems to think that multitouch trackpads are the way forward, but the nipple will eventually win the day.
• Stickers: The MacBook Air is extremely boring when you open it up—the entire thing’s just grey. Yawn. By contrast, the ThinkPad X1 has lots of exciting stickers on it; even better, these tell you what companies have supplied parts for your computer, enabling you to show off to your friend.
• Heft: The ThinkPad X1 is about 50 per cent heavier than the MacBook Air, meaning it’s far more satisfying to carry. You really know you’ve spent money on something when it’s in a bag and tugging at your shoulder. (Even better, 1.7kg is only the starting weight—you can actually make it heavier. I’m hoping for a special edition with a brick glued to the lid.)
• Battery: Lenovo reckons the battery should last up to five hours, compared to seven in the MacBook Air—a big benefit, because everyone works too much these days. The X1 makes sure you won’t, especially if your forget your charger.
• Windows: It’s got Windows inside! Everyone loves Windows.
• Poor screen contrast: Great reproduction of photos drops your productivity. By making on-screen graphics less exciting, you will do more work. Unless your battery runs out first, obv.
• Black: Black is the new black, and the black shell doesn’t at all make the X1 look like it’s the result of a torrid affair between a MacBook Air and a clunky 1990s Windows laptop.
• Specs: The X1 has more bullet-points than the MacBook Air, referring to extra ports and ‘stuff’ that is a surefire way to draw in typical users. They love lists of numbers.
• Storage: The SSD will be optional, rather than standard and enforced across the line. Futuristic technology is scary.

Run for the hills, Apple! I think I’m not alone in saying that Lenovo’s got you beaten here, and that within four days at most of the X1 being on sale, you’ll be down to third in terms of market-cap, because Lenovo will blitz past even Exxon, leaving you in its wake.