Be Excellent To Each Other

Now that my PC has taken up residence in my living room, I want something better than 3D pipes.
What is there?

I haven't bothered with a screensaver in any form since, oooh, 1998. I'm much happier with the monitor going on standby.

A turned off monitor and saving the planet? You oil burning money mad man.

But cycling through a selection of your best photo's would be nice for a little while at least.

Yeah, that's what I thought. I like the Vista ones, but I'm on XP now.

Its been ages since I've used a windows pc, but I think I remember that Darwin Pond (which is a little artificial life program where 'swimmers' evolve and eat 'food') has a screen saver version that was awesome.

It has been a while - it runs in a 640x480 window

EVE Online.

Because After Dark doesn't work in OS X so far as I've been able to determine, Mowin' Boris has been succeeded by Freefall, which is a mesmerising simulation of the Earth and all the manmade satellites speeding overhead. It has to be seen to be believed.

But, you sound like you're on Windows, so there's always the classic Fallout Screensaver or the Windows port of the OS X Flurry screensaver.

Is there any point to screensavers in this day and age?

To look pretty?

Page load error

Oh! Try this link for it.

I like Electric Sheep.

I have the photo collage screensaver in Vista, it's pretty neat.

The google images one I use in XP is quite good too. It has some lovely stock photos, I've not bothered pointing it towards my own piccies yet, I don't really use XP for much at the moment.

So do I, but I don't really want it using up bandwidth.

I'm never using a 'show my photos' screensaver ever again.

I've not noticed it consuming bandwidth particularly. It mainly downloads a sequence of jpegs if I remember correctly. I ultimately stopped running it because it made my computer run the fans hard when I wasn't using it

The electric Welshman plugin was less successful.

Scarily, that's 100% accurate.

ohmy. Don't you keep that shit hidden in the depths of your hdd?

Be more specific!

Wanna see the photo?

You mean you didn't instantly delete it?
I think my Mum still thinks I'm some sort of deranged pervert because she found a porno under my bed when I was 15.

My parents used to stay up and watch Eurotrash. Comfortable viewing, that.

Saw this one for myself way before it was all over the internet:

Ditto for my parents. It was one of their favourite programmes, despite it never having subtitles - although it was probably better that way anyway.

Was it you at a Dungeons and Dragons convention?

Indeed. Still, one's parents watching it with you is one sure fire way to get me to say "no" to watching naked ladies. The bastards. No telly upstairs, either.

Harry Potter and the homemade compilation of clips from Eurotrash

I used to hate it whenever anything steamy came on the TV while I was watching it with my parents. I'd immediately position myself so that I couldn't see their faces and they couldn't see mine to lessen the embarrassment factor. Nobody wanted to acknowledge that something rude was occurring on the TV, hoping the scene would change, until Mum would suddenly go 'Oh for goodness sake' and start stabbing at the remote control, which invariably needed new batteries. My toes are curling just thinking about it.

English people: Mental.

Mind you, my sister named her cat "Floozy" after our mum, so I can hardly talk.

My parents used to rent videos a lot and I (as a teenager) would often sit and watch with them.

I had to walk out of Pulp Fiction after the talk about clit piercings. And TimeCop (when Jean Claude Van Damme has HOT PUMPING SEX with a girl with ludicrously huge tits) was also extremely uncomfortable.

You sit there thinking 'it'll stop any second now and we can all pretend nothing happened' and then suddenly it's double anal penetration, and you were only watching ruddy Blind Date.

Things were never helped that my mother would try and make me feel less uncomfortable by making laddish comments like 'wahey' and 'look at her fronts', and 'whoa, she's built' and such when such things appeared on screen. You know, to let me know that she was 'down' with that sort of thing and not an uptight prude. Which, of course, had exactly the OPPOSITE of the desired effect, and only made me more humiliated to be talked to like that.

Your mum sounds ace. Wahey!

She is indeed ace... but this ability to say embarassing/disturbing things that STICK IN MY MIND FOREVER is one of her few flaws.