Overdone meme #94

What's in your copy-paste buffer at the moment? Hit Comment, hit Ctrl+V and submit the resulting gibberish to me. Just if you feel like it. I found this on a Google search for myself (shut up) and the results are often entertaining. And probably entirely fabricated.

If you're wondering, mine contains "Darkpaw". I don't know why, either.

Are you prepared to fly on a magic carpet?

I think that the recent downtime on FA (three completely separate issues within half an hour of fixing each other at last count) has driven one of the forum admins insane.



Just a theory.

I'll get you, Ben Croshaw

NOTE: The cutscenes in this game are VERY gory and bloody, so this game is not for the squeamish. Alternatively, you could read the walkthrough before you play the game, so you won't be surprised.

I can't begin to describe how little of the mood of the game this shows.

All things considered, I should probably have heeded that warning. I had known about the 5 days a stranger series (or, as it actually seems to be called, the Chzo Mythos) for a while, but when mentioned that they had been created by Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw of Zero Punctuation (who is very funny in a Marcus Brigstocke kind of way) it got my interest up enough to play it. And I have now been severely traumatized by an innocent-looking point and click adventure game.

The first in the series isn't too bad on the nerves. It's a bit tense at the same "ooh, this is a bit strange" level of most episodes of Doctor Who (i.e. those not written by Steven Moffat) but isn't likely to generate nightmares. You start off as a cat-burglar planning to loot an old mansion. Little does he know, however, that it's actually a DOOM HOUSE that is possessed by the ghost of what will later become known as John DeFoe - who takes the form of people when they touch an idol kept in the living room and gets them to kill others while wearing a welding mask and apron. And the warning on the download is slightly misplaced, as there are a couple of deaths, a body at the bottom of a swimming pool and a small amount of blood, but nothing like the wanton carnage that you're asked to prepare for.

This is a bit more like it.

Then I moved on to 7 Days A Skeptic. Unusually for a direct sequel, this game is set four hundred years after the original and on a spacecraft, which led me to believe that it would be entirely different from the first game. I was wrong. Shortly after the game begins, the crew recover John DeFoe's remains, which were shot into space shortly after the events of 5 Days A Stranger, and roughly the same thing starts happening to them. One of Yahtzee's favourite tactics, it seems, is to show your characters having nightmares. He's done this four times so far in the series, and the annoying thing is that I have not seen a single one of them coming.

The first part that really got me was just after the obligatory section where the hero is accused of the murders and locked up. In the middle of your protests, the possessed body of the captain wanders in behind your captor, breaks her neck and sets you free. Through some frantic clicking, you eventually force the monster into the cell where you were trapped and close it up. And then you wander off to warn the others. Except I went the wrong way, into the maintenance decks by mistake. Realizing my error, I turned around, opened the door and he appeared right in front of me. A scream and a shock cut to my character being strangled, and it was Game Over.

Once Whitney had peeled me off the ceiling, I somewhat foolishly decided that I would be able to continue, after looking up a guide to tell me exactly how to avoid things like that happening. But Yahtzee hits you with three things in a row. After the encounter with the possessed captain, the others decide that it's probably a good idea to escape, and go to sleep while the only available pod is refuelled. (Quite why an emergency escape pod needs a few hours to warm up is never really explained adequately.) In the morning, unsurprisingly, only two of the three remaining crew members turn up. Your character goes down to investigate the doctor's room, and finds what can only be described as a slaughterhouse, with a stitched-together torso abomination on the floor and spare limbs neatly arranged on the bunk bed. You would think that the similar scenes in Silent Hill would have been worse than this, but there's something about the clear pixelled artwork here that disturbs me immensely.

So after seeing that, you grab the key, run out of there as fast as possible, get back to the escape pod, open it up to discover that it is no longer there and are sucked out into space. I died here, and as my last save was before I went into the doctor's room, I decided I'd better stop. Then checked around the flat before going to bed in case anything was just around the corner with a machete.

However, I decided to face my fear and play it again on the way to work today. Passing all those scenes quickly, I got very near to the end, knew exactly what I had to do, approached the door to the captain's room, and the Welder burst out of it and stabbed me to death in much the same way as the captain had earlier. I'm not playing it again.

Recovering from Holiday

I have somehow survived the Thanksgiving week, and I'm now working at home taking a break to get over the holiday. I finally got to see again during the last day we were there, which was just about the only span of more than an hour that I had to myself over the past week and a half, but it was slightly marred by the nagging thought that I would soon have to get on a plane for six hours overnight. Daytime flights seem to waste more time, but there's something about knowing that you won't really be able to sleep with any degree of comfort for at least 24 hours that makes flying at night seem a dreadful idea starting the day before it happens.

So when the time finally came in the evening, we packed the van, climbed in and began reversing out of the driveway, whereupon the car instead shot forwards and demolished the garage door, which was a bit of a surprise. After some attacking it with a hammer and some pliers to get it back into a reasonable shape, it was eventually straight enough to close again and the journey went ahead otherwise as normal. My time waiting for the flight was spent wandering the entire length of the airport in search of Vitamin Water, which was eventually found in the shop opposite where we were sitting in two of its most revolting flavours.

Despite being overnight, the flight back was rather more comfortable than the flight there. This is largely due to my small, yellow and slightly illegal friend Temazepam - with its aid, I was able to go into a hypnotic sleep for about four hours, during which I unfortunately experienced the aural illusion of Dragonforce's entire first album being played in my right ear. I can't describe to you how nice a feeling it is when you wake up from a half-asleep stupor, half your hands numb from lying on them because the only comfortable sleeping position is slumped forwards dead on the tray table, look at the monitor and see your plane landing.

However, I won't be able to experience that in Britain, because temazepam is a class B drug there and I'll have to once again attempt to sleep unaided on the plane in a month. I can't understand why it's one of the most abused prescription drugs, as all it does is send you to sleep, with some unpleasant side effects such as memory loss, motor impairment, headache, muscle weakness and memory loss. The jetlag has hit me in full force today, but strangely, throughout yesterday I found myself perfectly alert, able to play the guitar rather better than I had previously and didn't experience any of the confusing hallucinogenic side effects of temazepam at all. Then I swallowed the television and went to bed.

On holiday - Part 5

Whitney's family have very strict and unbendable traditions for Thanksgiving (the day that the British give thanks that several boats pushed off and gave the rest of them some more room). It begins with a potato and egg breakfast, followed by a film, then a board game, then a traditional dinner of... seafood stew. Because they're vegetarians, you see.

This year, after altogether far too much debate about the subject because there really weren't any good Thanksgiving films out this year (whatever a good Thanksgiving film is), we went to see Hitman. Now, it's true that I share my dad's taste for really stupid films (Independence Day, Van Helsing, Mortal Kombat, and so on) but I genuinely think that the reviews for this film have been rather harsh. I would actually go so far as to say that it's the best game to film conversion so far, although let's be honest, competition in this field is not fierce. And I haven't played the game for more than about ten minutes over at Craig's when we were in sixth year of school, so I don't really know anything.

I had only been aware of Timothy the Oliphaunt since Die Hard 4, in which he was rubbish. But here he somehow works, because much like Roger Moore he is only capable of one expression - that of mild annoyance - and that translates rather well into being totally emotionless. The plot involves Scottish Bloke, English Bloke and Russian Bloke attempting to find Agent 47 as he performs various hits, but beyond that is not incredibly coherent. And it's not as if he would be very difficult to trace. "Tall. Bald. Barcode on head." It's true that the film is just one gunfight after another, but you couldn't expect any more, really.

The board games came out next, and in a variation on the traditional theme, they were both DVD-video games (something that I hadn't seen since the likes of Atmosfear about fifteen years ago). These were Scene-It and Jeopardy.

On a technical level, I was quite impressed with the Jeopardy game. It uses three infra-red "buzzer" units which communicate via IR to a large battery powered "game unit" that doesn't appear to contain anything at all, which passes on signals to the DVD player via an IR transmitter that is velcroed to the DVD player's IR receiver. Understand that? Keep going, it gets better. I'm not certain of the memory on DVD systems - I had thought that they were just flowchart-style menus with very little room for actual variables, but this keeps score and keeps track of subjects chosen from a six-by-six grid throughout the game.

However, where it falls down is how they've chosen to ask the questions. The only quiz game that did it competently was Trivial Pursuit on the Commodore 64, which was brave enough to rely entirely on the judgement of the other players to decide whether you'd got a question right or not, which was perfect - otherwise you're working with parsing hundreds of multiple possibilities and deciding whether a misspelling is close enough. This goes for having multiple-choice answers - and while that's not disastrous in itself, the possible answers they've chosen make even the difficult questions extremely easy. For example:

This composer wrote Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. What is...
a) Mozart
b) Beans
c) An abdominal muscle

Osiris was the Egyptian god of this.
a) The afterlife
b) Biscuits
c) Hairdos

So the best way to win the game became the "Stab furiously at the buzzer until it recognizes you" tactic, followed by ticking the obvious answer. Although there were a few bombs in it where you were supposed to know the height of a dam in Kazakhstan or the like. The other disadvantage to this game is that when we opened the DVD player drawer it was no longer there, and said player is now out on the table with the disc presumably lodged in its innards until someone can find whatever star-shaped tool is needed to unpick the insane star-shaped screws on the sides.

Scene-It is actually much better - it has a far simpler DVD system than Jeopardy did (and I'm glad I've got that out the way, because it's an incredibly awkward word to spell), relying on just a menu to select different categories from, from which questions are chosen at random. And the correctness of an answer is decided by the other players, with tie-breaker questions also provided. It's a quiz about films, which I don't really know much about (see opinion of Hitman, above) but has enough observation-type questions to make sure that pretty much everyone has a chance.

Then there's the meal in which everyone eats far too much, then bed, followed by tree-hunting the next day. I may write something about that, but seeing as I'll be on another six-hour flight within twelve hours my capacity for writing entertainingly is not fantastic.

Back from Los Angeles

By the way, I should probably mention that all the entries I'm going to post over the next couple of days are from the past - I've spent a few days at Whitney's grandmother's house without Internet, and it's amazing how isolated it makes you feel when you normally rely on it so much for communication. So I'm going to get around to answering any emails (which I need to do, at great length) soon.

On holiday - Part 4

Today, I got up (not through choice) at about 6am in worry about the coming car journey. Scavenging the house for food again, I found some fat-free milk and half a decaying sandwich from yesterday. Then, at about half past nine, we set off - six people in the car, Whitney and I relegated to the back seat as something approaching cargo because nobody else can fit there, and four hundred miles ahead of us.

I don't think that I've ever had a car journey that lasted more than about two hours since my family used to drive all the way down Britain to catch the ferry over to Germany, but strangely, it didn't really feel that long. Californian roads have a strange speed limit that is something like the average between the actual posted speed limit and whatever everyone is actually doing, unless an obvious unmarked police car is nearby in which case everyone goes as slow as possible. So, at a more or less constant 80 miles an hour, the distance flew past. This journey is something that Whitney's family do quite regularly, but I wouldn't care to experience it again if I can possibly help it.

This is the route.

Now we're finally at Whitney's parents' house, where they're constantly stressed about their increasingly stupid builders - they're having their bedroom rearranged, and this involves moving a couple of other walls around. Whitney's cupboard has moved across the room and everything is coated in a thick layer of dust that we've just about got through. We'll have about two days with nothing incredibly hectic on the horizon, then a trip to get a Christmas tree, which the brothers are always incredibly picky about (it absolutely must be an inch above arm's length to be the right height for the ceiling) and involves a lot of struggling and falling over. This would be a strong contender for the most stressful holiday ever if my own family hadn't insisted on going down to St Andrews most years when I was in primary school and packing six people into a caravan.

On holiday - Part 3

Good morning grass, good morning coconuts. After some confusion as to the plans last night, Whitney and her parents have run off to Disneyland leaving me and rest of the Geriatrics Club behind (Cameron has twisted his ankle, Drew has a cold, and I am slowly going mad and can't cope with lack of proper Scottish food such as meat, fat and gristle). The trouble is that in a house owned by someone who survives entirely on yoghurt drinks, there isn't really any actual food - I did attempt to scavenge some breakfast from upstairs, but I can't recall quite how many years the Cheerios I found were out of date.

It appears that we're going to spend the day watching the worst television in the world - at the moment Jerry Springer is on and has a lot of people with silly accents standing around forgetting their scripted lines and occasionally hitting each other with chairs, but not quite enough for it to be entertaining. And then there's four straight hours of Home Improvement.

Added at 6pm: In the middle of the Transformers film. Send help.

Life in the city, living in L.A.

I've just realized several things. I'm in Los Angeles, surrounded by rather obscene wealth. Somehow, this has made me realize even more that nothing is the same as it is in Britain - the Scotch pies I used to like from Fisher and Donaldson are unknown (in fact someone had to ask me what "pie 'n' chips" were the other week - I was unable to begin explaining it to someone who had no idea of the concept). Nobody here understands what cricket is, and I've no idea about the rules of most American sports - American football in particular seems like a large-scale violent version of Backgammon. And I'm constantly lamenting how rubbish American television is compared to what I miss in Britain, particularly now the writer's strike is set to eliminate all the virtually identical police dramas that fight off all the virtually identical vote-off-by-week reality programmes.

In other words, I've become the Sherrif of Huddersfield.

On holiday - Part 2

I think it's fair to say that nobody in the family was particularly enthusiastic to go to a cocktail party for the over-80s, but it wasn't too bad an experience - in particular, it featured the most expensive-looking buffet that I am likely to see in my entire life, and we all stuffed ourselves with the gigantic pile of sashimi.

And today, we went down to an all-you-can-eat brunch buffet, where everyone made themselves ill and then had to suffer the indignity of the Toilet Attendant. This is something I haven't experienced before - he hangs around outside the cubicles, sprays your hands with soap when you approach, hands you some paper towels and then expects a tip for it. I can't describe to you just how incredibly awkward it is.

One of the advantages of Whitney's grandmother's house is having a pool outside, and we swam during the evening, with me discovering that I can now just about manage twice my official badged swimming length - five metres. Never really having learned to swim is quite embarrassing at this stage, seeing as if you fell into the water while dead you would probably float five metres faster that I can swim it.

Tomorrow we were going to go to Disneyland, but nobody feels up to it any more. We might even drive up back to Whitney's parents' house instead. Five and a half hours on the road - you couldn't drive anywhere near that length in Scotland, you'd fall into the sea. And I wouldn't be able to swim.

On holiday - Part 1

I feel like I've just been transported back in time about three centuries. At the moment I'm sitting in Whitney's grandmother's house, in a room that many years ago used to be her mother's bedroom and still looks like part of the set of Blackadder the Third. We're here for a few days to go to the other grandmother's 80th birthday before we drive up the road to the Bay Area to spend the rest of the week.

The six-hour flight over was undoubtedly not the most horrendous experience of my life, partly because I had prepared myself by putting several tons of British TV onto the iPod I got from them last Christmas. I used not to mind flying that much after getting over a fear of it that lasted until I was about sixteen, but now that I've flown so regularly between various parts of America and Britain I've become aware of just how dull the whole experience always is. My work laptop is now unable to help because its two batteries are almost entirely shot and have a combined capacity of about 11% of what they originally had. So I sat watching Father Ted, while Whitney's brother slowly slumped further and further into the aisle, scaring many small children.

Then something that only happens in films happened - one of the air-hostesses came on the loudspeaker and asked if there were any doctors on board, because we had a passenger with a medical emergency. This was followed by a lot of running about with defibrillators (which no matter how serious their use, is still a ridiculous word that sounds like something out of a Roald Dahl book). His condition undoubtedly helped our flight land faster, because we came in very sharp and there were ambulance crews waiting for our arrival. However, he walked off by himself when they came to get him, so he wasn't as dead as they thought.

Long Beach Airport looks like what could politely be described as a concentration camp. I thought that Aberdeen's airport was small, but this is just a tiny hut surrounded by some planes - even the baggage carousels are relegated to outside the building, next to a tall fence with loops of barbed wire across the top and tannoys mounted on every spiked fence post. After we grabbed our bags I was half-expecting some Daleks to turn up and escort us off, but Whitney's parents picked us up before they could arrive.

And now my internal clock is hopelessly confused, I'm falling asleep in the middle of the day, have no idea what anyone is saying or what's going on - so things are pretty much normal. Time to go to the cocktail party.

23

I don't know if I ever mentioned this here before, but around the end of school and the end of university, I was convinced that the number 23 was following me around. Several significant dates in my life added up in some way to 23, I had locker number 23 in the Purdie building, I found one morning that someone had stuck a "23p" label to my doorframe, and so on. Yes, exactly like that film, so mentioning this would probably have had a greater impact if I'd mentioned it years ago. I was shocked enough to discover that that was what it was about yesterday. And now I am 23, so either it's going to be very good or utterly terrible.

As it happens, today I was honoured with the entirely new experience of receiving absolutely no presents on my birthday. Work was hectic (and because of the wonder of the Internet, still continues to be hectic, seeing as I'm sitting on the sofa with the laptop and debugging things from home) because catastrophic faults in the system always emerge 24 hours before we send it off to the client, and the weather outside was drearier than Scotland has ever managed, so it was quite hilariously gloomy all round. Still, let's look on the bright side - tomorrow I'll have a six-hour flight, followed by a cocktail party for the over 80s the next day, then a six-hour drive through a featureless barren desert to get to Whitney's parents' house.

Happy birthday, . Happy birthday, Glenn Barry from Kamelot. Happy birthday, Mrs Hill who was my teacher in fifth year of primary school. Happy birthday, me.

Eternally fighting, but carried side by side

I'm making steady progress on the guitar after nearly two weeks at it, and can play a significant amount of Iron Maiden's worst song, The Angel and the Gambler (which Steve Harris must have written to make up for some sort of A-chord deficiency). Watcher in the Sky was also quite simple once I realized that I was playing it from the wrong end. In fact, a lot of things that you'd think to be very difficult are actually reasonably easy once you've tied your fingers into the right knot, but currently I'm stuck on attempting the B minor chord, which is like a miniature version of Twister.

I'm also surprised that after however many years of its existence nobody has invented a way to denote rhythm in tablature yet - that's a pretty major deficiency for a musical notation. As it is, most writers of the ones I've downloaded just put a fairly arbitrary amount of spaces in between each note and hope that you've already heard what you're trying to play enough times to emulate it.

I finally created an account at last.fm last week, too, though at the moment I can't recall why. I let it upload my recent playlist just before realizing there were a lot of hideously embarrassing things from DDR on there, and have pieced together a playlist of some favourite bands, but haven't got around to linking my account to anybody else as yet. I've noticed that if something goes wrong with the online radio, you get the information page for a prog/death metal band from Spain called "Undefined" (which could hardly have been a better way of getting recognition if they'd thought it up intentionally). And while looking around the default links from my account's charts, something leapt out at me on the page for the jazz pianist David Newton...



I wrote that. Fair enough, it's got a grand total of one play worldwide, it's there because of the system's inability to differentiate between songwriters with the same name, and is naturally unavailable on the site itself - but I have a song on last.fm!

Oh dear

I know that finding yourself laughing at code is a sure sign that you should book yourself into the nearest mental institution as soon as possible, but I had to save this quite frankly incredible offering from the Java forums here. This leaves me in the uncomfortable position of either posting something that will appear as gibberish or having to explain its utter hilarity from my viewpoint, but I'll just hope that people will understand its quite astounding uselessness.

package javaapplication3;
import java.io.*;
public class Main {

public Main() {
}

public static void main(String[] args)throws IOException
{
int count=0;
String w= "today is a short day";
for(int m=0 ; m<w.length()-1 ; m++)
{


count++;
}
System.out.println(count);

}

}

As one of the regulars said: "This has to be the best example of reaching one's left hand around one's backside to scratch one's right ear (and not even quite reach it) that I've ever seen. Classic!"

One Year

I've now been working here for exactly one year - and it doesn't actually feel anywhere near that long, let me tell you. Maybe it's because I no longer have the handy year-by-year separation that you go through in virtually every other year of your life before finally having to get a real job.

Since arriving on the first day and going straight into C# for the first time on a plugin that someone had half-written and then abandoned, I've been moved up to sitting where the lead consultant used to be, working on the main system that we develop, and being in some way responsible for documents involving complex safety procedures for a rather large petroleum company. (So if half of America disappears under a giant oil slick in the next year - sorry, my fault.)

And even after all this time, I keep on discovering new things buried away in the heart of the system. One of the highlights recently was the comment that read //Probably don't want to do this, but the real question of the day is what on earth a Cacodemon is doing hiding in our install of a set of wiki software under the name "dummy.gif".

The Continuing Quest for a Decent Korma

Korma became one of my favourite meals in fourth year of university, just in time before I moved to America where it can't be found anywhere. If you haven't heard of it, it's a nicely mild curry made with coconuts and occasionally cashew nuts as well. Indian restaurants in America sometimes have something that they call "Korma" on the menu, but it usually fails to resemble anything that I've previously experienced.

The "Coconut chicken korma" that I ordered tonight sounded promising, but after the Night Owl delivery man had braved the icy winds and storm outside to deliver it, what I found inside the bag was a small tub that contained a tomato-flavoured thermonuclear device. I did attempt to re-engineer the stuff by boiling it up with some cream and a spoonful of coconut sorbet, but I was totally unable to get it to calm down to something I could comfortably cope with, spooned out the chicken pieces, and detonated the rest of the liquid in a controlled environment. I think I'm going to have to accept that Indian restaurants here just haven't got the hang of it.

Additionally, why did no-one inform me that Top Gear was back on again? I've got three whole episodes downloading now and another one about to become available on Sunday.

E A D G B E

This morning I did what no human being in possession of all their faculties of reason has done before, and sent a praising comment to the MBTA. My journey home was interrupted last night by someone who had clearly not watched Robbie (see yesterday) and had distributed themselves over a wide area of the rails near Kent Street, preventing the train's progress until the police and fire crew had finished cleaning/mopping up. And the driver of the train I was on, rather than providing the endless stream of "We will be moving momentarily" that I've experienced before, told us exactly what was going on, what we were waiting for and gave us the option of leaving immediately if we didn't want to wait. Which I did, and walked home, beating the train to Brandon Hall by five seconds.

But what's really exciting is that a couple of days ago, Whitney ceremonially paid for a guitar for me. It's an early birthday present/slightly late Christmas present, and I hope to finally get around to learning how to play more than a few bars of a few songs like I've been saying I will for the last four years - an ambition previously made difficult by my guitar being three thousand miles away. It's a Johnson strat copy, which was recommended to me by Rockin' Bob (which is a fantastic name for a guitar shop, and right across the road from work) as a good cheap starter. So I've been following an online lesson - and along with an increasingly steady performance of the chromatic scale that is slowly driving Whitney mad, I've covered six chords, which already puts me above the ability of Fred Durst. The only disadvantage is that the lessons I'm going through have me playing a significant amount of decidedly pickup-truck-driver music.

I might be starting off at a bit of an advantage, though, because one of the instructions on the fourth lesson of the beginner's tutorial I downloaded reads (and I'm paraphrasing a bit, but I promise you this is what it says): "To hold the guitar correctly, place the body on your leg with the neck parallel to the ground. If there aren't any strings under your right hand, turn the guitar over." Perhaps the lessons are a bit lower-level than I thought.

Scaring them straight

Some weeks are just difficult, and this is one of them. Here are some horrifying videos that you might recognize if you grew up in the UK at the same time I did.

The community has been sitting dormant in my Friends list for ages. (The name comes from an old preschool TV programme with Fred Harris (or Chocabloke) about... a yellow machine with a weird bass voice, I think, but it's impossible to describe most programmes I watched growing up without sounding as if I've taken a decent quantity of hallucinogenic drugs, so this tangent is stopping here.) I was very pleased that someone finally posted something in it in celebration of Halloween yesterday, but rather horrified to find out what it was.

In the 1970s, the BBC saw fit to create a number of "public information films" to show to pupils to prevent them from doing anything too deadly. They did this by inciting severe trauma unequalled by any horror film that has ever been written, and showing them in schools well into the 80s. Each of them started out with a selection of happy but rather stupid children, who were then killed off in various ways throughout the film as a result of being unable to recognize the dangers of farm equipment, railways, crawling into ovens, holding lit fireworks, and so on. The one behind the link above is "Apaches", which was one I had never actually been shown even though we lived in an area that was surrounded by farmland. I've only watched bits of it, but it seems to be about as grim as I would expect.

The one that I do remember is Robbie, which was responsible for me being terrified of trains for a length of time that lasts pretty much up to "now". This was actually designed as a less graphic alternative to an earlier film called The Finishing Line involving a series of deadly sports-day style games played on a railway track, clearly written by someone with a mind rivalling the Jigsaw Killer. (NB. I have not watched the film behind that link, and if I were you I wouldn't either.) Anyway, Robbie was more traditional and straightforward, involving just crossing a railway line carelessly. There were numerous versions of it, and I'm certain that the one seen by the author of that Wikipedia article had been sanitized somehow, because I distinctly remember having to watch as an oncoming train approached and cut the titular character into about twelve bits.

Building Sites Bite is another one that sounds familiar but I can't actually remember watching, probably because I had my eyes closed throughout its duration. This video's token dimwit was called Ronald, and involved (not surprisingly) killing him off in a building site. Except it had a unique twist - after he died, other characters in the film would resurrect him each time and send him back to experience multiple deaths such as burning, burial, drowning, explosion, incineration, and a whole host of other things. A bit like Dante's eighth circle of hell. And all accompanied by a Knightmare "Life force draining, team" style heartbeat sound whenever it was recommended that people who wanted to keep their sanity should close their eyes.

And in the small amount of investigation I did into the minds behind these films, I found that one of the writers (the man responsible for "Apaches") also starred in a Doctor Who story called "The Reign of Terror". How appropriate.