A CD-ROM that promises a "unique insight into the mind, soul and music" of a top-selling musician is surely a cue to run for cover. But when the perpetrator is part-time actor, rainforest saviour and tantric-sex machine Sting, you know it's got to be good for at least a couple of laughs. On this front All This Time doesn't disappoint. Spread over two discs we are granted access to Sting's magic world of fantasy castles, old manor houses and ruined chapels. There we can "sit in" on some hot "jam sessions" or listen respectfully as the great man himself tactfully explains that even he thought lots of his films were shit. Still, Sting is a very cultured fellow and has many interests. We are not only granted permission to wander around his library, hear him talk about his musical influences and watch bits from his favourite TV shows, but we are also privileged to view some hilarious video footage of the man himself prancing about in a pair of Y-fronts, doing Yoga.Like so many other music CD-ROMs, All This Time is only really going to appeal to Sting's warped hardcore fans, who usually know all there is to know about him, anyway. So is there any point in them forking out for this CD? Well, I'd say yes, since there's loads of great "Stingfo" for them. You get to hear him rattle on about literally everything. Sting on politics. Sting on history. There's probably a bit somewhere where he gives his views on astrophysics. One fact I learned was that on his deathbed, Sting's dad praised Sting for making better use of his hands than he had. Funny, that. I always thought Sting was a bit of a wanker as well.
- Daniel Pemberton
All This Time PC CD-ROM, by Starwave: £39.99. Philips Media: (0171) 911 3000, on the Web at www.starwave.com/.
What have I done to deserve this? I thought my editor liked my last review. But instead of some trendy CD-ROM game, he gave me a six-year-old novel about roaches. Actually, my bitterness was misplaced. The Roaches Have No King is a blackly funny cockroach-eye view of New York apartment life (and, therefore, of existence per se). It details how a community of roaches responds to the calamitous sanitisation of their environment when the human owner installs a new kitchen. The deranged Numbers, so named because his first gruel was made of chewed pages from that book of the Bible, narrates it; his brood-mates Phil and Columbo are named for Classical Philology and The Columbia Encyclopaedia.Numbers, who has the strategic deviousness of Henry Kissinger but is, alas, totally insane by the book's end, is engaging - for a roach. He attempts to manipulate humans in order to prevent the colony's starvation, shorting out the lights, setting off the smoke alarm, trying to drive away the owner's girlfriend, and so on. Numbers eventually leads a Long March across the kitchen work surfaces. Exposed "like sunbathers in a grade-D beach horror movie", the roaches are massacred, leaving only Numbers, who assassinates the perpetrator of this genocide, replacing his stash of cocaine with Draino, then propositions his girlfriend.
The novel is full of smells and decaying food - Bukowskian low-life seen from the level of the skirting board. It has some crusty (or encrusted) observations about human toileting procedures, and a great deal of information about Blatella Germanica, the featured species. The book is a kind of Moby-Dick for the millennial mindset. Melville was encyclopaedic about whales, and also preoccupied with larger metaphysical concerns; Weiss's obsessive focus on the German cockroach is necessarily more cramped and bitter in tone. So as we approach the millennium, the cockroach is again scuttling to the vanguard of contemporary consciousness as a metaphor for the human condition. Weiss even claims that cockroaches are less degraded than us, in an existential sense.
- Jon Bradshaw
The Roaches Have No King, by Daniel Evan Weiss: £8.99. Serpents Tail: (0171) 354 1949, on the Web at www.serpentstail.com/.
There hasn't been a really good "god game" for some time now. The genre that began with Sim City, then spawned Sim Life, Sim Farm and Sim Tower, entered the world of mankind with Civilisation and when last seen was languishing in the more immediately combat-oriented worlds of Command & Conquer. But now the god game is back with a divine vengeance: Afterlife is the first god game that lets you play god.The concept is very similar to the original Sim City, except that instead of messing around with office blocks, power stations and transport systems, you're in charge of a fully functional heaven and a soul-crushing hell. As a lost soul passes into your domain, you must ensure that the right kind of reward or punishment awaits him upon his arrival. Much as you would "zone" different areas in Sim City, here you lay down areas that relate either to one of the seven deadly sins or the seven holy virtues. As time goes on and more souls are saved, these areas grow and the buildings erected become ever more bizarre.
True to the LucasArts school of game designing, Afterlife is packed with comedy. The rewards and punishments are brilliantly conceived - for example, a slothful soul will spend his eternal damnation sitting naked atop a mountain of really gritty sand, his hands bound with tape to prevent him scratching. The ethereal disasters have to be seen to be believed. Let's just say that hell freezing over is a very real possibility and when the four horsemen of the Apocalypse go surfing ... watch out.
There is also a nice line in comic banter to be had from Jasper and Aria, your spiritual guides. Aping the "devil and angel on your shoulder" routine, Jasper and Aria not only give you hints on how to keep your afterlife thriving, but also have enough personality clashes to put them up there with the great comedy double acts of all time.
Afterlife's only flaw is its similarity to Sim City. Some might even claim that it's little more than an update with different graphics. But then Sim City was a damn good game - so what's bad? All I know is, Afterlife is bloody playable and that's what counts.
- Paul Presley
Afterlife on CD-ROM for Windows 95: £39.99. Virgin Interactive: (01373) 453888.
Helen is sleeping rough in London, on the run from her mother's indifference and her father's sexual abuse. Accompanied only by her pet rat and the visions that spill from her scarred imagination, she soothes herself by compulsively copying Beatrix Potter drawings. Her life becomes increasingly wrapped up with Potter's characters, who take on human identities - the fox Mr Tod as a lecherous MP, the gardener Mr McGregor as the kindly innkeeper who gives her a home. Finally, amid the mountains, Helen finds the strength to confront her past and take control of her life.The Tale of One Bad Rat is that rare thing, a comic with a purpose - but even if you're a superhero diehard, don't let that put you off. Beautifully drawn and brilliantly scripted, it tackles incest with a sensitivity and directness lacking in most other treatments; Helen is never a two-dimensional victim and her situation is never a generic "textbook" case. The beauty of the Lake District, and the weirdness of the slippage between Potter's pastoral world and Helen's modern dystopia, make this a modern graphic classic.
- Hari Kunzru
The Tale of One Bad Rat, by Bryan Talbot: £9.99. Titan Books: (0171) 620 0200.
Let's face it: I need more email addresses like whales need more Norwegians. But frankly I don't care. All that matters to me is that I am the first kid on the Wired block with email on my mobile phone.Imagine: you send email to sgeer@airmail.co.uk. Seconds later, it appears on my phone's LCD display, thanks to the magic of Airmail's SMS gateway. That's Short Messaging Services to you, squire, and short means short; SMS supports only 160-character messages, though it does some cunning concatenation tricks to make longer messages possible.
Airmail will divert and forward mail. It will even let me send Internet mail, although the limitations of a standard phone's keypad - not to mention this reviewer - make it hard work. And it's all upper-case hard work, too, which will not endear you to friends and colleagues.
If they have any spirit they'll take their revenge by sending you a huge attachment with their reply, thereby elegantly alerting you to one of the limitations of this technology - you'll get several hundred UUencoded messages which you'll have to clear one at a time. Oh, and pay for the privilege at your GSM phone network's rate. That's 5p a shot for my Orange, and more for the other networks. But hey, if you need email on the road that badly, you'll live with it.
- Sean Geer
Airmail for Orange, Cellnet and Vodaphone: £25 connection, £10-plus per month. Dynamical Research Systems: (0171) 584 0084, email info@airmail.co.uk, on the Web at dsres.com/airmail.
I have always envied secretaries. While their trained, dexterous digits produce line after line of error-free text, the best I can do is stab and poke at the keyboard, unable to type a single word without corrections.I need be humiliated no more since I've discovered Kurzweil Voice 2.0, the latest version of the award-winning speech-recognition software. Previous versions required special soundcards, but as Version 2.0 works with almost any Soundblaster-compatible card, notebooks can carry it.
It takes a little time and effort to get the most from the software; as it comes preconfigured for a composite US voice, and at first understands precious little UK English. Matters improve greatly, however, once you "enrol" - you say some 400 words into the microphone provided and wait for the PC to process the information. Although this takes around two hours it is worth the wait as it improves recognition by about 50%. Further training is done on a word by word basis. This process of continual error correction can be frustrating, bizarre and funny in equal parts. For example, one of the (more printable) permutations of my name was "Fleece Horseman". Still, over time the error rate drops off, and when it works it is quite incredible to see your words appear on screen. By the end of the first day I could, with patience, dictate a memo.
Voice is more than just a dictation machine. You can format, edit, print and save documents, and also use macros to insert large chunks of text. The software is designed for use with a variety of packages, including spreadsheets and browsers; it's not just a plug-in for word processors. You can use Voice to navigate between packages, or customise it.
Against this, it does take time to get up to the 60-plus words per minute that Voice can handle. Also, with so much going for the software it seems a shame that the suppliers have skimped on the hardware, including a rather fiddley microphone and earpiece. If you're in search of the "Mission Control" look you should probably make an additional investment. But for those with more practical and serious intentions, such as taking on the secretaries, Kurzweil Voice should - eventually - do the job.
- Rhys Grossman
Kurzweil Voice for Windows 2.0: £699. Responsive Systems: (0171) 602 4107, email talk@easynet.co.uk, on the Web at www.talk-systems.com/.
Surf music usually leaves me colder than had I ventured into the outer reaches of the Milky Way wearing only a Speedo. Still, it looks as if the wonders of science will soon bring us better surfin' toons. Experiment Zero, the latest Man or Astro-Man? recording, has been transported to us lucky Earthlings from the 21st century.This surf music not only has a capital S, but a capital F. The chunking, bending guitars and pounding drums thrash along, accompanied by strange voices echoing from the future, via the past, where people all sound uncannily like serious fellows from 1950s sci-fi flicks. Imagine a black-and-white laboratory where a peculiarly well-groomed Yank busily clones surfmeister Dick Dale, muttering "Sure, to you she's just a set of inter-correlated coordinates; what fun is that?"
Wacky band-member names usually have the same effect as a 15-mile-high neon sign reading "Frisbee this CD now for the good of humanity." But for Man or Astro-Man? we can make an exception - "Coco the Electronic Monkey Wizard" is probably as common as "Derek" or "Martin" in 2100. - Phil Gyford
Experiment Zero, by Man or Astro-Man? One Louder Records: (0191) 232 6700.
I've never been a huge comic freak, though one of the Fantastic Four could infinitely extend any part of his body, a feat which no doubt impressed his lady friends. Nevertheless, Marvel superheroes and the like, despite wearing pants over their tights, having names more ridiculous than the characters from Hackers and sporting bad full-face make-up, still managed to look really hard and cool - quite a feat, considering. The fighters in the seemingly endless string of 32-bit one-on-one beat-'em-ups do not usually achieve this; with their stupid boxing pants, top-heavy bodies and freak-mutant animal heads, they look about as cool as your dad breakdancing in a back-to-front baseball cap shouting, "Yo! Bumrush the DJ!"Cool-looking characters do not automatically make a good beat-'em-up. But completely ridiculous fuck-off special moves do, and X-Men: Children Of The Atom has got loads of them. Play as Iceman and you can drop stupidly large ice balls on your opponent's head. Or choose Sentinel, who can launch a fleet of small rockets to attack his foe. I know this is like judging how good a film is by how many explosions the trailer has, but luckily X-Men plays amazingly, too. It's so good I didn't even notice that it was an "old-fashioned" 2D fighting game until a friend pointed it out. It's also got loads of characters, nice little twists such as "X power" (allowing you to do even bigger special moves) and groovy graphics. Beating the crap out of masked, jump-suited weirdoes has never been so much fun.
- Daniel Pemberton
X-Men: Children Of The Atom for Sony Playstation and Sega Saturn: £44.99. Acclaim Entertainment: (0171) 344 5000.
Imagine multimedia has a psychotic cousin who's kept locked up in an attic, one with a hare-lip, an odd stunted body and unpleasant personal habits, who escapes periodically to trash multimedia's tidy, beautifully rendered living space. Its name is I/O/D, and it's arrived from the dark side to foil the plans of corporate multimedia developers worldwide.I/O/D 3 is without doubt the single most perverse thing you could insert into the orifices of your Mac. Boot it up and I get - not very much. It contains four little items that work in between the lumbering proprietary software on my code-gorged machine. "Index" seems self-explanatory. I know what indexes do. Except this one - doesn't. "Navigate through I/O/D by controlling the weather," say the instructions. The weather duly appears on screen, only I can't make it do anything. Is someone making a point? How about "static story for a small screen"? "This is a piece of interaction that we recommend you print, then go outside to read." Now I'm scared. This is screwing with my head.
I open up "Limbo". And I keep on opening. Folder within folder , a text gradually spelt out in empty windows. Oh God, no. Do something, damn you! I want to be entertained! I want something useful! I'm beginning to sweat, cold droplets running onto the keyboard. "Utility". That should do something I can understand. "Utility is a useful utility," says the blurb. But inside there are strange scribbled faces and speech bubbles spouting crap that seems to be coming out of my Netscape cache. It's as if my computer is having a breakdown. The rest of it I can't make work, but by now I'm so disturbed I'm no longer sure that's not supposed to happen. Other multimedia pretends to be groundbreaking; I/O/D breaks ground with a jackhammer. Playful, anarchistic and liberatingly pointless, it forces the (ab)user to ask whether they want the future to be free, or just shrink-wrapped.
- Hari Kunzru
Download I/O/D 3 (along with the previous issues) at www.pHreak.co.uk/i_o_d/. To find out what the hell is going on, email matt@axia.demon.co.uk.
For those of us who are unable to have a real live pet, life can be harsh. I live on the fifth floor, so I can't have a cat. I'd love a cat. What am I meant to torment when I come home all stressy from work? Someone gave me a punchbag last Christmas, but it wasn't the same. It's mental violence I want to inflict, not physical. But now I've discovered the Cat in the Bag, I need fret no more. When I get home I insert the battery into the little motorised ball, drop the ball into the bag, and fasten the neck of the bag around the stunningly realistic cat's tail. Already the object starts to twitch in my hands, but drop it on the floor and - hey, presto! Full tormented-kitten effect. Watch the bag flinch and turn as kitty desperately tries to get out! Thrill to the realistic sounds of rustling and growling! So much better than TV (especially if, like me, you frenziedly kicked in your screen one night). And I haven't even begun to tell you about what fun you can have when hypersensitive animal-loving friends come round ...- James Flint
Cat in the Bag: £9.99. Live & Exclusive, Trocadero Centre, Piccadilly: (0171) 434 1011.
Soon after her return from behind the looking glass, Alice chases her pet parrot into her aunt's grandfather clock and ends up in a weird termite mound in 1998 Manchester. It's populated by computermites, who use a binary system of beans to answer questions put by an inquisitive badger. Alice tries to find her way home, discovering along the way that words rarely mean only one thing and that the future is a jigsaw of the past.Automated Alice, Jeff Noon's new novel, combines the iconography of his previous books - mind-altering feathers, fascistic "civil serpents" and whimsical tech - with a fresh set of ' 90s Carrollian characters. We meet Quark the invisible cat, Professor Chrowdingler and Alice's automaton double, Celia. Charles Dodgson's ghost appears, as does a wonderland version of Noon himself, Zenith O'Clock, writer of wrongs and author of the frictional books Shurt and Solemn.
Noon writes in the Wonderland spirit, all about the paradoxes inherent in language and logic, but chaos theory and computer logic replace the puzzles from Leibniz and Zeno. His nonsense poems aren't a patch on Carroll's, but he provides good-quality word play and lots of nice rhetorical tricks.
Like its urtexts,the book works on enough levels to satisfy the needs of young and old readers, although some parents might balk at their kids reading about a modernised Alice taking a shit. Still, if you want to encourage a kid to phil-osophise, better this than the execrable Sophie's World any day.
- James Flint
Automated Alice, by Jeff Noon: £14.99. Doubleday: (0181) 579 2652.
If I wrote this review just by noodling on about nothing in particular you'd probably have quit reading it already. But when the Bloke from Room and La Douche Rhythmique write comics that noodle on about nothing in particular, they somehow manage to be highly entertaining.[Thinks]: It's great when comics come into the office. Any excuse not to read my email. These are especially cool. Black and white, low production qualities - just folded sheets of photocopied A4 stapled together. Obviously underground. Better make sure the rest of the edit team sees me reading 'em. They'll think I'm really cool.
First one's a story about a guy called Rian Bone. He's the creator of iambent music (that's iamb-ent, from the Latin iambere, to make long, or to lie down). He sits around and muses quite a lot, about many different things. He has quite a nice time. A thought hatches: is this a subtle piss-take of that cultural commentator and god of modern music, Brian Eno?
[Later:] I read another comic about techno and how to make it. "It takes a special guy. Sometimes three. It takes years of taking the heaviest acid, years of looking tough on dancefloors, years of not ringing your mates." Are all these comics about music? No. The next one, Hieroglyphix, is about things, like Bill Clinton visiting Sharm-el-Sheik. And a bee.
I'm off. It's been a busy day. All that effort. My head hurts.
- Cooper James
Comics by Bloke from Room and La Douche Rhythmique: 40 pence each. Available by mail order from Fresh Offence Productions: send an A5 SAE to 30 King Henrys Road, London NW3 3RP.
It had to happen. The Internet is the ideal topic on which to beguile and bamboozle, so the publication of The Bluffer's Guide to the Internet should surprise no one.In keeping with others in the series, the book tells you what you need to know to impress, without putting you through the hassle of actually acquiring any real understanding. So we learn (again) what the Internet is, what you need to get on it and what you might do, or not do, once you get there. Descriptions are accompanied by criticisms, discussion points and urban myths, all in a suitably humorous, slightly cynical style. Just what you (silver-tongued but technically illiterate) need to get by at a dinner party. On the downside, it's badly ordered and has a rather tedious section on types of Internet user.
Of course, a bluffer's guide will be of little use to the true expert. But if you want that air of experience, without the experience itself, spend £2.50 on the book and you too can save the £2,000-plus and countless hours of frustration it takes to become a seasoned surfer.
- Rhys Grossman
The Bluffer's Guide to the Internet, by Robert Ainsley: £2.50. Ravette Publishing: (01403) 711443.
If you think that You've Been Framed is the apogee of people's TV then you're probably quite sad. You're probably also employed in the entertainment division of a commercial TV station. C4's Takeover TV, the BBC's Video Nation project and various Video Diaries are more credible ways to democratise television, but the main benefactors of cheap video technologies have been TV stations, which can produce hours of programming at very low cost. Distribution remains in the vice-like grip of middle-aged, middle-class men named Tony.Enter Canadian whizz-kid Stephen Marshall on a mission of video empowerment. Marshall and various left-field cohorts produce Channel Zero, an attractive video-zine and Web site, using it as a forum to display their alternative Hi-8 explorations. They're also looking for would-be video makers to contribute to future issues.
The Channel Zero philosophy is quite straightforward. Most of what we learn about the world is through TV. The way network TV is now, the viewer tends to feel isolated, paranoid and quite prepared to use a semi-automatic assault rifle at the slightest provocation. Stephen Marshall just says NO to this situation. People should do what he did - take off round the world and video the real stories and the characters out there waiting to be found. This led him to the engaging Robert Pitts, self-styled Prince of Belize (read: very poor, trying to manage a fairly large crack appetite), salt-of-the-earth, bursting with eloquent observations on himself and his society. As Marshall observes, "A network would have shown him as just some crack addict."
There's a skunky visit to Amsterdam, and some brilliant conspiracy pieces by Mike Scrivener, alleging among other things that Nicole Brown Simpson was actually murdered by a crew so hardcore that even the Mafia is scared of it. It's all scored by tripped-out beats from IRL favourites Ninja Tune and Mo' Wax. There are moments of touching humanity, inspired brilliance and a lot of stuff that gets quite boring. But, hey! If the choice is between Channel Zero and You've Been Framed, I know which I'd choose. Mind you, if Marshall taped any footage of a bride falling over at a wedding and sent it to Beadle, he could net up to £200 and get the tape back. I wonder if he knows?
- Jamie Cason
Channel Zero, by Stephen Marshall: on the Web at www.channel-zero.com/zero.html, email zero@channel-zero.com.
The world doesn't need another spreadsheet. Microsoft's Excel is the undisputed champ of the field, and it's nearly impossible to think of a function that can't be dropped into the program's familiar grid.That's what makes the Let's Keep It Simple Spreadsheet so interesting: it doesn't have a grid. Rather, this financial-modelling application is more like a drawing program with a built-in number-crunching engine.
Want to add two numbers together? Drag out a cell for each number and an operator brick that's labelled "x+y". Connect the cells to the brick's inputs. Connect the outputs to a third cell. Type your numbers; see your answer. Now, say you want to add a whole load of numbers together. No problem: grab the corner of one of the input cells with your mouse and turn it from a single input field into a large table. Unlike Excel, you can't accidentally type into an output field and obliterate your result. Let's KISS also has a powerful feature for reports and templates.
This is obviously a release 1.0 product. For example, you can't type in trigonometric functions like sin(x); Let's KISS has trig functions, but they only work in degrees, not radians. It doesn't have a random number generator, and it isn't designed to handle large data sets.
Nevertheless, Let's KISS is remarkably easy to use - even playful. And after working with it, I got a much better feel for what's happening with my data than I ever did with Excel. I just hope it isn't flattened by the Seattle Steamroller.
- Simson Garfinkel
Let's Keep It Simple Spreadsheet for the Mac, by Casady & Greene: £130. Softline Distribution: (0181) 401 1234, fax (0181) 401 1235, on the Web at www.casadyg.com/.
Looking for a book that takes a wry look at cybersociety from the viewpoint of one well-versed in its customs and culture? Read Douglas Coupland's Microserfs. If, on the other hand, you'd prefer a hastily tossed-off attempt to cash in on the current zeal for anything with "Net" in the title, I give you The Net-Head Handbook compiled by Nick Rosen.Pitched as a Sloane Ranger-style guide to the net.community, the book classifies users into eight poorly-defined social groups, bestows upon each a cheesy nickname ("The Netropolitan", the "Net-Vet") then executes a contemptuous character annihilation on them all. This would seem to limit its readership somewhat, neither appealing to seasoned users ("... when Net-Vets get together, the chat is of such mind-numbing tinyness as to be almost inconceivable") nor providing a starting point for bewildered newbies ("... no amount of painful and time-wasting experience can dent Mr Newbie's hopeless ignorance").
There are occasional snippets of worthwhile advice (the hint to webmasters to avoid huge imagemaps with no text alternative - sadly ignored by the designer of the official Net-Head Handbook site) but these are so embedded in arrogant cynicism that any potential bene-ficiary will have long since consigned this book to their recycle bin. In fairness, Rosen has succeeded admirably in one thing - proving why net.comedy rarely translates onto the mass-market humour bookshelves. The Net community is rife with brilliantly sardonic webzines, programmer jokes and nerd humour. Sadly this is generally lost on everyone but the Net community; when diluted this far, any satirical barbs become totally devoid of their bite. Don't get me wrong. This book certainly raised the odd chuckle - those many heavy-handed references to the author's own "Internet Consultancy" firm, Intervid, and its clients were clearly made in a highly witty and ironic spirit.
But if the Internet really is killing off the book as a printed medium, this publication should be an early casualty. Now that would be ironic.
- D. A. Barham
The Net-Head Handbook, by Nick Rosen: £9.99. Hodder & Stoughton: (0171) 873 6000.
Oh No! Multimedia's gone all Pete Tong! The Essential Mix (Interactive) (FFRR), the latest house product to hit the Wired stereo, also has a mixing toy. Pete's entire set, processed into 2-4 bar chunks. Now wannabe handbag DJs can rock their bedrooms to their PVC hearts' content.
"What do I get?/No love/What do I get?/No sleep at night." Those nice people at EMI Premier have rereleased the first two Buzzcocks albums, Another Music In A Different Kitchen and Love Bites. As if that weren't enough punk, No More Heroes and Rattus Norvegicus are back out, too. No wonder my monitor's covered in spit.
We have a thing at Wired about famous Belgians, and they don't come more famous than C. J. Bolland. Yes, alright ,Hergé is more famous. Various brands of beer are more famous. Unless you're into techno you've probably never heard of him. But the man's a god. A bona fide god. And he has a new album out. The Analogue Theatre (Internal) is good. And hard. And Belgian. We like it.
When they're not listening to C. J. Bolland or cute error messages on their Macs, Wirelings are checking out School House Rock! Rocks (Lava), a compila-tion in which the likes of Pavement, Biz-Markie and the Lemonheads play songs inspired by '70s American Saturday morning educational TV. For some reason everyone especially likes Skee-Lo's "The Tale of Mr. Morton". Now why should that be?
D. A. Barham is a TV and radio scriptwriter who doesn't like to admit having once worked on Celebrity Squares.Jon Bradshaw believes that haecceity is instantiated through adrenergic stimulation of the limbic system. He has three bicycles and is angry that such aids to satori are not zero-rated for VAT.
Jamie Cason is a sometime comedian and writer. His influences include Oliver Reed, Henry VIII and Buddha.
James Flint is a section editor at Wired.
Simson Garfinkel lives on Martha's Vineyard in a 150-year old house with his wife and three cats.
Sean Geer is managing editor of Wired.
Rhys Grossman is a consultant at Coopers and Lybrand specialising in new media.
Phil Gyford is LANlord at Wired.
Hari Kunzru edits this section.
Daniel Pemberton pretends that he doesn't care that he has just messed up all his exams, but he does really.
Paul Presley is the only member of the IMF ever to have been caught and killed.