Laika is, without a doubt, the most affecting comic/graphic novel I have ever read. The story of the dog behind Sputnik II - the first living being to be sent into space - it is a beautiful mixture of fact and fiction that leaves you both emotionally touched and intellectually enriched. When I bought it, I thought it might be a children’s book, but after a while I lost the ability to rationally assess it and instead got drawn into a world of poverty, oppression and startling realism.

Nick Abadzis has obviously done his research. The detail and depth of information in Laika is incredibly impressive, but it doesn’t weigh down the storyline like it might have done with a less talented author/artist. I highly recommend Laika - but make sure you read it somewhere people won’t see you crying. I suspect this would reduce even the most hardened bloke to tears.

Amazon: Laika - Nick Abadzis

Tatty, tatty, tatty. I live and breathe for pay days - not so I can eat chocolate cake again, but because it means I can spend a lazy afternoon buying hideously expensive junk jewellery from Tatty Devine. There’s something quite amazing about waiting for and receiving a tissue-wrapped Tatty box and digging straight in to unearth clacky, shiny plastic just dying to amuse you and your friends. It hurts - actually physically hurts - to tell people about Tatty Devine, in case they beat me to a necklace I really want.

Everyone has their favourite classic Tatty Devine necklace, but if anyone felt like buying me a present it would have to be the Dinosaur necklace in black. It consists of over 50 bits of individually hand-crafted acrylic, painstakingly threaded into a necklace with teeny tiny beads. Unfortunately it’s out of stock at the moment, but that particular item is desperate to be worn to the funeral of an elderly relative. I’ll have to stick with the Fishbone necklace. Sob.

In a desperate attempt to stop the slow wash of passé-ness that’s been spreading over Facebook for the last few months, a drastic make-over has been introduced. At last, a major web-based organisation has realised the importance of good design. Here’s a peek…

A lot of people will probably say that Facebook has taken a step back from the new design era - applications have been pushed to one side on separate tabs, and the wall and mini-feed have been merged into a big one-size-fits-all feed/wall. Both neat and messy at the same time, I suppose. So what’s made the designers at Facebook take a firmer hand at the wheel and steer away from MySpace-style user-generated design?

The boffins at their design labs (I always imagine white surfaces, bean bags and people in designer glasses swirling pristine pencils over plain lined notepads) say that it’s to “make the site simpler and cleaner“, but personally I think it’s because they didn’t expect to applications to grow in the positively insane way that they have. At this moment in time, I have 713 unanswered application requests (see my previous article about this for more info), all of them completely and utterly useless. I mean, even Facebook-useless. And they’re all there because Facebook were clever enough not to let the public mess with their design, but cowardly and populist enough to let every moron with Notepad have a pop at making groups and fan-pages and Ninja-fighting Badger Fruit-box applications. They wanted to show off their code, and they wanted everyone to get what they wanted in a style that would get people off MySpace without bugging them about their standard design template.

So yes, it all went a bit crazy, and Facebook have had to have a major (and yet “democratic”) redesign to stop people clogging up their pages with tat. Because this is the central point about web design, and one that Facebook designers have always had tabs on: just because users like to design their own pages doesn’t mean they’re any good at it. Some of the profiles I’ve seen have taken minutes to load on a full-strength connection. It’s like MySpace all over again - ugliness, slowness, unfriendly design. It’s web communism - everyone gets a piece of the internet, which is theoretically fantastic. But in practice, it’s bloody atrocious.

The problem with Web 3.0 (or whatever number it is we’re approaching now) is that all these widgets and embedded bits and pieces are making things so dirty and incoherent. Again, in theory, fantastic - you can make a little box with all your stuff in it, and people can effectively hotlink your servers by putting it in their site. Free advertising, more traffic. Sounds brilliant.

It’s not, though. Because even if your design’s the best ever, who’s to say it’s going to fit in with what’s around it? And who’s going to stop someone from embedding it in an unsuitable site, or taking it and ripping the shit out of it? Once you’ve put it out there, you’ve lost control - both of your content, and of your design. What’s worse is that if you remove it, you’re potentially breaking thousands of people’s websites.

The point is, if a website is designed well, it shouldn’t need other people to assemble it for themselves. It should be a place that everyone can trust: trust to give them what they want in a simple and effective manner. You should promote yourself through your good reputation, not by pimping yourself far and wide across the net with apps and widgets. People should be able to find you via simple text links and good reviews. If you have to promote something via complicated, propagandistic embeds and applications, chances are it isn’t that good to start with.

Facebook started this way, by learning its lessons from the failings of MySpace and others and understanding the basic tenets of usability and good design. By continuing as it always meant to go on, let’s hope it stays.

Ah, Revels. Beggars’ Milk Tray. Sweets for the indecisive. The chocolate treat that attempts to cater for all, thereby catering for nobody. Feel like Maltesers, but don’t want to fully commit? Need chocolatey, raisiny goodness, but feel the need to throw in a sugary, powdery version of some other fruit? Don’t really care whether or not you know what you’re about to eat? Never fear, Revels are here.

Revels seem to base their whole strategy on the fact that there are people who wander into sweet shops with no clear idea of their aims and objectives. They know they want something sweet. It should preferably involve chocolate. They don’t want anything too chewy, nor do they feel like anything too soft. They’re buggered if they’re going to drop the cash for a box of chocolates, but they don’t want to be eating the same thing for the duration of their sweet experience. Then, suddenly, they see the Revels: yes, why not?

This is both the joy of Revels and the stone around their neck. I would estimate that very few people actually go to buy chocolate with the sole intention of buy Revels, because the fact is that there is always at least one Revel that you really, really hate. If you’re really unlucky, it’s one of the ones you can’t discover via simple scientific experiment. Personally, I despise the coffee ones. This would be extremely problematic if I liked the orange ones a great deal, but I never feel too bad doing a firm “squish test” if it bumps off the orange ones as well.

This is, of course, a good time to review your opinions of Revels, since there’s a vote out to get rid of your least favourite flavour for a while, to be replaced by a mysterious new flavour. I highly recommend visiting the Revels Eviction website and placing your vote - and I’m very pleased to say that coffee is losing by a fair margin. However, it’s closely followed by poor old raisin, so quick - place your vote now!

In the interests of fairness, I would like to link to this excellent review with a chocolate-by-chocolate breakdown. Unfortunately, it favours the coffee, but I suppose someone has to like them.

Sorry, but I really liked this. I suspect that everyone else will hate it. It’s formulaic, has the same plot as the other two, and nukes the fridge big-style. But then, I liked the latest Indiana Jones as well.

The question you have to ask yourself is, why do you go to the cinema? Some people go to be moved by beautiful, well-crafted docufilms - others go for historically-accurate action flicks, or clever little romcoms. All of those things are good, but personally I think there should be more films where you can just leave your brain outside the cinema with the ancient popcorn and dodgy hot dogs. The Mummy provides this service extremely well, and to top it off it has an amazing website.

There are problems, though. Big ones. The biggest is that Rachel Weisz isn’t in it this time.

Sorry, I was just trying to find you a link of her saying she wouldn’t do it again, and I found this. Wow, it actually looks like someone predicted the whole thing all along, back in 2001. Unless it’s a hoax, that is. So yes, The Mummy 3 really is that predictable… Wow. Go read. Do it. Now. Bugger my review, that is now irrelevant.

Being a fat pig myself, I’m not quite sure what I was expecting from this play - well, I suppose it was to be told that it’s okay to be one. I expected that an anti-fat play would never call itself something so brazen as “Fat Pig” and that it would, therefore, be a heart-warming tale of how love struggles on through lard. Well, it isn’t. Sorry.

But quite aside from the wholly obvious plot with the twist that you expect from the moment you read on the Fat Pig website that it’s a tragedy, the second most obvious thing is the accents. Now, I have seen a great many episodes of My Family, and I’m pretty damn sure that - hot as he is - Kris Marshall doesn’t have an American accent. Less amusingly, I was also unfortunate enough to attend the same school as Robert Webb, and I can assure you without a doubt that we all would have known if an American was attending our school. Or living in our area. Or a black person. Or an Asian. Although inbred people were welcomed with open arms.

So why on earth were they putting on American accents? It wasn’t central to the plot - I mean, we have offices here in the UK: also anti-fat bigots. In fact, we have less fat people, so the anti-”Fat Pig” sentiment is surely much stronger? Either way, it totally ruined what could otherwise have been an amazing play. Ella Smith was amazing as the fatty, and Joanna Page - well, she wasn’t that good to be honest, but she looked skinny and bitchy in a high-waisted office skirt, and I suppose that was enough.

Overall, not a bad play - but I accidentally went when Pride was marching through Trafalgar Square, and seriously regretted not watching that instead. The noise the participants caused, though, was enough to eke out some truly inspired ad-libs from Marshall and Webb, which were without a doubt the funniest parts of the play. Shame Pride isn’t on every weekend.