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Chavs will steal your expensive new car next week! You will realise that you would not have needed to get the bus to work if you’d had the good sense to get that GPS tracking system fitted!

Your sweet old grandmother will be mugged by a hooded youth after she leaves the post-office tomorrow. You will write a letter to the Sun expressing your anger and demand more police officers on the beat in your area.

Jupiter and Saturn are in conjunction on Tuesday, and as such everyone you’ve ever met will be blown up by some evil foreigner. You will realise that giving the police additional powers to hold terror suspects indefinitely without charge might have stopped this happening.

Your house will be broken into by an Afghan taxi-driver this weekend. Maybe it is time you considered hiding in your airing cupboard until all this has blown over?

The moon is in alignment with Mars this week, suggesting that you will be arrested for a murder you didn’t commit, and will bitterly lament in your cell that there was no centralised DNA database with which you could prove your innocence.

Your identity will be stolen by a 14 year old crack-whore this weekend. After losing your house and all your belongings to the bailiffs, you realise that a small and affordable biometric identification card would have saved you a lot of bother!

Jupiter rising indicates an Iranian chip-shop proprietor will set fire to your grandparents in the coming weeks. Perhaps if there were CCTV cameras outside their flat (or preferably in their living room) such a horrible tragedy could be averted?

This week you will realise what a scary place the outside world is, and that there are thieves and murderers on every street corner. Look out the window. Can you see them? With their evil, beady little eyes! Why not watch some Big Brother to take your mind off it? Big Brother will make everything better!

Muslim extremists will blow up your face on the way to work tomorrow. Why not have a small, unobtrusive implant placed under your skin that allows your friendly government to ensure your safety in the future?

Mercury falling means you might hear rumours of “Cyborg Law Enforcement Units” patrolling the streets of London. Just ignore them–if you’re innocent, then you’ve got nothing to worry about.

Today you will realise that emotion is the primary cause of all pain and suffering in the world, and that by injecting a government-supplied emotion suppressing compound into your blood stream on a daily basis, you will be able to live a carefree and productive life in service of your great country and leaders, free of the shackles of the terrible fear that grips your daily life.

You are free. You are happy. You live a productive and carefree life. Your government will protect you. You are free. You are happy. You live a productive and carefree life. Your government will protect you. You are free. You are happy. You live a productive and carefree life. Your government will protect you.

Popularity: 16% [?]

Okay, we know that Doctor Who is about time travel and everything, but have we slipped into some kind of freakish parallel universe where Catherine Tate is actually funny and ought to be in more T.V. shows?

No, we didn’t think so because Doctor Who is clearly a television programme. Therefore were it to genuinely effect the space-time continuum, then frankly the BBC would have a lot to answer for on where on Earth they’re spending our license fees.

Although to be honest we thought some sort of written explanation (or apology) was in order when we inadvertently stumbled upon The Catherine Tate Show when it was first on. Then another explanation when the show started being described as “refreshingly original” or “hilarious new comedy” during the promos. We wrote this off at the time as some sort of act of desperation by the BBC realising that the show stank and attempting to trick idiots into watching it. Maybe it was. Maybe it worked.

But the upshot of all this is that, horror of horrors, Catherine “I’m seriously not funny” Tate has invaded prime time favourite and all round wonder-show, Doctor Who.

Catherine Tate said in the BBC News Story, “I am delighted to be ruining Doctor Who”, or something along those lines.

What to do? The best we’ve come up with so far, is to print out the following image of Freema Agyeman:

and stick it onto your T.V. during the new episodes, in the hope that it will at least partially block the Tate from view. Look what she’s done! She’s even ruined the word “Tate”. My brain used to associate that word with the Tate Modern in London - a very well respected art gallery even though the cafe’s a bit of a rip-off. But now, I hear the word “Tate” and I immediately become enraged and have to go and lie down for a bit and maybe watch a bit of The Thick Of It or Absolute Power, or any other - you know - funny comedies.

Popularity: 22% [?]

Look! There it is, up to the right next to the Games tab. Isn’t it nice?

Yes, Lemmy&Binky are pleased to announce our all-new, all-singing, all-dancing features page! Sporting all manner of wondrous and exciting articles from Celebrity Guests, this section is literally chock-full of Games Industry insights. It’s miles better than Gamasutra. You’ll never need to bother reading that drivel ever again. In fact, you may as well just delete the rest of the InterWeb since everything you ever need to read is right here*!

*May not actually be a fact.

Popularity: 15% [?]

So, you’ve finally got that game development job you’ve been waiting for your whole life?

Well done you!

But what’s this? Everyone seems to be talking in some mythical language? “That damn Dreb’s been wheeling since Alpha!” What in buggery are we all talking about?!

Don’t worry, that’s just how game developers speak, and after reading our jargon busting guide, you’ll be able to talk just like a game developer.

And if you’ve not made it into the industry yet, try dropping these beauties in at your interview, and they’ll probably assume you’ve been busting out games for years!

Behold the wordage!

Alpha - A mythical date rumoured to be made up by publishers to scare developers into working faster.

Anonymouse - Rattish looking tester guy no one recognizes, and that you assume is new, but who turns out to have been working there for six months.

Asset Manager - A central repository for your incorrectly named files to get lost in.

Beta - The day you hug your family outside your house, and say goodbye to the dog with a tender rub of its head, before climbing into the back of a taxi to stare in mourning at your waving loved ones, whom you will not see again for several months.

Camracks - The particularly nerdy section of the programming team. Camracks are usually identified by their long black leather coats that they think make them look like Neo out of the Matrix, but don’t.

Deriver - Name given to a designer who is made so purely because they are shit at what they were actually employed to do. They survive by unceremoniously cobbling together “things that worked” in other games with little thought of why they actually worked.

Dreb - A senior employee that never does any work, but goes out drinking with the studio heads and so gets away with it.

Extension - The crucial stage of development where the release date is moved back three months.

Gatekeeper - The privileged member of staff that can inexplicably bypass the company firewall, and whose shared folder is the company’s primary source of Lost, Heroes, 24 and Battlestar Galactica episodes.

Going for a coffee - Going for a whinge.

Going for a ciggie - Going for a whinge.

Going for a meeting - Not having a meeting, but an excuse as to why you’re away from your desk having a whinge.

Graphics Tablet - Performance enhancing drugs taken by artists to make their art better.

Milestone - What the publishers believe has been done on the project in a given month.

Mollying it up - A term often used in marketing departments, or amongst staff when their studio head appears in an interview. “Mollying it up” may include making bold and erroneous statements about the game reinventing its genre, or detailing amazing features of the game that are sure to be chopped out before release on account of them being the rambles of a dangerously optimistic designer.

Nogylop - A back-facing polygon.

Paper beard - The pad of paper taken into meetings in order to look like you’re on the ball, which is generally only used for drawing little faces.

Placeholder - Final art.

Pray-day - A monthly opportunity to find out how much financial difficulty your studio is in.

Poly-pusher - A term used by programmers to describe artists.

Prick - A term used by artists to describe above programmers.

Pulling a Sid - Used to describe a lead designer’s actions when insisting that their name should be on the front of the box.

Previewing - The remarkable precognitive ability of some game developers to be able to read reviews of the game they are working on months or even years before they are even published.

Prototyping - A way of explaining not doing actual work.

Quoquadrahedrant - A really complicated thing to do with polygons your primitive brain couldn’t possibly understand.

Rendering - Something for your PC to be doing so it looks active while you’re away having a whinge.

Rebuild All - Same as above, but for coders.

Schedule - A joke.

Skribb - That weird new guy who gets dumped on that project… you know the one! Tee hee!

Sleep Token - The food, up to the value of five pounds (ten dollars) that is used to justify 5 hours of unpaid overtime.

Smirkey - The bizarre ambivalence felt by smokers when simultaneously joking and crying about the game they are making, as in “Fancy going for a Smirkey Tab?”

Time-stomp - A mail sent out to your long-departed boss at 4am in the vain hope they will notice it was sent out at 4am.

The Brown Mile - The journey from home to work on a Sunday afternoon.

The Sims - The people game developers see out of the window that are mysteriously leaving work at 5:30.

Wheeling - Work-avoidance ritual carried out by programmers, traditionally on Fridays after the lunch time beer. The mouse-wheel is used to periodically scroll up and down a source file, along with a furrowed and intense thinking expression on their faces, and while listening to music on headphones. Sometimes writing “I am bored” into the code, then deleting is used for extra effect. The artist form of wheeling is more sophisticated, sometimes even involving rotating a model around as well as zooming in and out of it.

Wings - A rite of passage in the game industry. Getting ones wings pertains to the first time one has overdosed on Red Bull at 4am.

Popularity: 20% [?]

Well who’d have thought it, eh? According to the BBC, the European Space Agency is after some volunteers to take part in a simulated space trip to Mars! Now, I know what you’re thinking – grab six gamers who play DOOM and they’ve got all the necessary skills to cope with anything that happens up there, yeah? Or maybe, just to cover all bases, also stick someone in who’s played Zak McKracken through to the end? But no! It turns out that what the Esa really need are not gamers, but game developers!

You see apparently, their goal is to gain some sort of insight into human behaviour in the kind of conditions astronauts would encounter in your typical space flight to a scary planet. And aside from weightlessness and radiation, typical conditions include:

• Cramped conditions
• High workload
• Lack of privacy
• Limited supplies

Not unlike working in the games industry is it? Also, most programmers would probably be immune to the effects of radiation, and the fatties (a.k.a. engine programmers) could do with experiencing weightlessness.

Unfortunately, it seems the criteria for volunteers also include:

• Good health
• Non-smoker
• High motivation
• Non-drug taker

…which pretty much rules everyone from the games industry out. Oh well, it was a good idea until I read the article in more depth.

Popularity: 15% [?]