Every now and then my computer at work or my computer at home says to me:

Are you sure you want to continue? y/n

and I find myself wondering, despite being aware that it's almost wilfully perverse to misinterpret it this way, whether the computer is asking the question in broader terms or just with respect to the task at hand. When it happens though I tend to derive a lot of satisfaction from thinking about it a bit and then very deliberately clicking yes. It's kind of nice that someone (well, something) cares enough to ask.

Instead of going home on time today I stayed back playing the Painkiller demo. It's an FPS game with a very fully-realised atmosphere, in which you go around with a big gun that fires wooden stakes which you use to slay zombies that throw either hatchets or their own internal organs at you. The game uses nicely-implemented rag-doll physics, the upshot of which is that when corpses get hurled about (which is to say constantly) or pinned to the wall by your stakes (which is ideally also constantly) they look very convincing. You restore your health by consuming the souls of the fallen. Compared to attacks that simply kill your enemies, those that reduce opponents to unrecognisable smears of gore are somehow nothing so much as very satisfying. There isn't a lot of depth or consequence to it, but it's more fun that I can describe, and I can't begin to account for why.