My UCAS personal statement was apparently written much like the works of Douglas Adams. So was my physics coursework on Dark Matter. I also got Ian Fleming and, like apparently most people, Dan Brown.

Interesting fact:
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...
was written by Shakespeare.

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was written by Neil Gaiman, as was
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turns out to be a little-known work of Agatha Christie, sixteen lines of 'aa' is another of David Foster Wallace, and 32 lines of just the letter a is another great work by Vladimir Nabokov. Replace them with 'b's and we're back to Foster Wallace.

If you ever feel the need to write the alphabet out twice in upper case and then lower, you're plagiarising Neil Gaiman.

My old Playpen post analysing the Gender Genie with FerretBrain articles was penned by Edgar Allan Poe. Whee!

Hmm...

Wilkie Collins writes like Charles Dickens

Robert E. Howard writes like James Joyce

The Bible writes like Kurt Vonnegut

Waah! I spoke too soon.

Although I got "I Write Like JK Rowling" from analysing one of my articles about Harry Potter, so...

You know who else writes like Lovecraft? Sarah Palin.

Apparently I write like HP Lovecraft?

Weirdly consistently...

Or David Foster Wallace (I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHO THAT IS).

At least I didn't come up as JK Rowling.

@ Bryn: I didn't know that, thanks. Seems a shame: the original version was so brave and so fitting.

If only it were.

PS: I'm seriously addicted to I Write Like. Depending on which of my recent articles you shove in, I write like David Foster Wallace, Stephen King, Raymond Chandler... or Dan Brown. Noooooooo!

(Also that bit at the end where she says (more or less), 'And another reason to worry about this is that it leads kids to actual drugs'. Because that wasn't the first three reasons at all.)

Seriously? Or is that from some US version of Brass Eye?

Jamie,

Did you say people don't like Wheatley? Who are these strange people?

According to the original Game Informer article back when Portal 2 was first officially announced, Wheatley is one of several AIs you will encounter in Portal 2.

Also, make sure to watch the other videos on Valve's channel showing some of the new mechanics in Portal 2. It looks like it will be even better than the first game, which will be quite a feat.

Will anyone here be getting the only proper PC version of Portal 2? It would be fun to play co-op with people from this site.

@ Alasdair: Hmm, I hadn't thought of 'official fan-fic', as it were. That might be a fruitful line of investigation, or... not so much. Can you e-mail me a bit more about the novels, e.g. are they regarded as canon?

As to the Portal 2 trailer, my main reaction is, 'Gosh, aren't people from outside the UK going to find him a bit tricky to understand?' But that's one reason the subtitles, I guess. Also, with respect to the last bit of the trailer (and being perhaps unnecessarily careful not to spoil the end of the original Portal):

Having read the Number of the Beast review: damn, that's some good vitriol. I tried reading it once but I stopped after a few dozen pages when I realised that Heinlein was in fact going to keep me up to date on the status of one character's nipples throughout the entire novel.

Mixed? What? He's amazing!

On the one hand, a talking Weighted Companion Cube seems needless.

On the other hand, it's nice to see the writing is as hilarious as ever. I liked the password joke.

Abrupt topic shift!

So, anyway, as part of their master plan to avoid making Half-Life 3, Valve is going to be giving us Portal 2 sometime between now and 2017. Anyway, they appear to have given us a new character, and the reaction seems to have been...mixed, so I was wondering what you guys think of him. Personally, I like the little guy...just so long as he doesn't ask me why I persist in my loneliness.

Also, because I love a review of a bad book of the next man, here's Dave Langford peering into the madness that is the later work of Robert A. Heinlein.

I'd like to help, but I don't have any real experience in fanfic. The only thing I really have any experience in that could conceivably be misconstrued as "fanfic" would be Pocket Books' Star Trek novels, and those have traditionally been kept under way tighter editorial lock and key than regular fanfic. Of course, restrictions have been relaxed over the last few years, so some of it might be relevant to your ideas. Maybe.

Was that ANY help at all?

[... tumbleweed...]

Hey folks, anyone feel like a collaboration?

I watched a thing the other day that made me start pondering some ponderables that feel like they might well lead to an article, but one almost inevitable aspect is going to involve fan-fiction and that's something I have very little experience or understanding of. So someone with some knowledge in that area would be very helpful. Without giving the game away, but giving hopefully enough information that you can tell whether you might find it an interesting ponder, I'll say that the thing I watched was by Tom Stoppard and the ponderings are likely to explore what Dan talked about under the second sub-heading of his review of Harry Potter and the half-blood prince. Not (necessarily) the Harry Potter things, but the general idea.

(I can be e-mailed at an address known to the editor, who can be e-mailed as described here.)

I think it is a simple formula. It says "here is the segment of my fantasy world the story shall centre on; here is a weapon which I will describe entering people's heads, torsos and limbs in a variety of interesting ways". That's kind of all you need to know. ;)

Hey, the cover art for Joe Ambercrombie's next novel looks exactly the same as all his other novels....

He can't be Gary Stuier than GM's superer than super Superman in his All-Star stint.

Um... I thought the point of Superman was that he's a ludicrous Gary Stu? I mean, the clue's in the name and everything.

I hope it's bullshit and that Bruce has no blood heirs or clones. It dilutes the
awesome.

I agree with this so hard. Especially since he seems actually pushed as the only "real" son and better because of his genetics.

And it would actually be the best thing to happen to that character if he found out he wasn't related to him.

re: Damian Wayne
I hope it's bullshit and that Bruce has no blood heirs or clones. It dilutes the awesome.