This is quite literally what happens when you spend the entire week chatting on a videogame-related newspaper blog...

"I'm too full of pizza to do anything constructive this afternoon, so I thought I may as well submit it now." And with those gallant all-too descriptive words Office Pest emailed his Best Of text to me on Friday afternoon, no doubt assuming that nothing of gargantuan importance would hit the Chatterbox past 3pm on the last day of the working week.

Fortunately, plenty happened before hand, including Final Fantasy XIII, great game quotes and how to become a meat-up regular. That sounds wrong, doesn't it?

Final Fantasy XIII – tempted?
On Monday morning, a beautiful weekend had just passed – clear blue skies and lovely bright sunshine. Such a shame that FFXIII didn't arrive on most people's doormats (myself included – hrumph), which meant we couldn't spend the whole sunny 48hr period indoors, in the dark, sat in our underpants, crouched over a controller. Or would that just have been me? [Regretably, I'm thinking, no - Keef]

Tuesday (release day) spawned a few early blogger reviews of FFXIII for those of us lucky enough to get it a day early (w00t!). Plus points seem to be the shiny visuals, impressive cut scenes, frenetic battle system (when you eventually get it). Negative points are the very slow pace (20 hours of linearity for a start) and typical angsty-teen and fluffy-girlie characters. It seems like this one needs time to settle in, but has already done a good job in dividing the blog.

Heavy Spoilers (again)
Despite Heavy Rain only being out for just over a week, many people had already completed it and the blog was resplendent once again with posts headed 'HEAVY RAIN SPOILERS'. This was frustrating to say the least for those waiting for the Qauntic Dreams masterpiece to hit the bargain bins, and it all got too much for Bigworv – "Can you go and talk about Heavy Rain somewhere else. One of you f****rs will forget spoilers and ruin it for me."

Bargain Spotters
In between talk of Modern Warfare 2, football and mugs, PhilosopherK1ng managed to find a great bargain on Valkyria Chronicles – only £19.95 from ShopTo! Chubster2010 later spotted another bargain buy – Chinatown Wars on PSP for £4.99 from play.com. Sadly this one was quickly whacked back up to £24.99, but a couple of people did get their orders sent out at £4.99. Good bargain spotting fellas – keep it up!

What a bunch of mugs...
On Wednesday morning Be4ch expressed a desire to have his own Gamesblog mug, as his company now requires people to bring their own mugs to work for... you know... 'green' reasons. He even mocked up several and has linked them to a Wiki page that he also set up.

What a legend! He clearly has too much time on his hands (as do the rest of us I guess, else we wouldn't be on the blog all day).

Great London Pubs and Worst Places to Live
See Wednesday's box for a full list of the best London pubs. As for the worst places to live, honourable mentions go to Feltham, Canary Wharf, St Mary's (Southampton), Hull and Stockport. Apparently PipSickness once found a dead lady on his bonnet when he lived in St Mary's, which led us all to wonder whether he is in fact the famous Southampton Ripper.

Favourite game quotes
On Wednesday we got to discussing the best gaming quotes of all time, including such beauts as "You were nearly a Jill sandwich!" from Resident Evil (actually, it was "almost, a Jill sandwich" - Keef), the synthesized voice that said "Good luck!" as you exited the tunnel in Starwing, the garbled voice that says "Treasure Island Dizzy!" in the game with the same name and the all-time classics "Rise from your grave!" and "Welcome to your doom!" from Altered Beast. (I would add "Another visitor, stay a while, stay FOREVER", "Welcome to the stage of history" and "Game over, yeah!" though the latter is technically a song lyric - Keef)

Get bitten by the bug...or dog
On Thursday our resident abstainer timthemonkey regaled us with his story of the night prior:

"Gaming – None, as I went for a nice jog in the evening sunshine in an effort to get slighter fitter before Cricket season starts. This, however, turned out to be a poor plan as it lead to me getting savagely bitten by a dog on the back of the calf. 12 stitches and a three hour wait in A&E and the fitness kick had lost its appeal. Looked at it this morning and the surrounding area has gone a wonderful shade of purple as well. Feet up tonight!"

Cue jokes over purple, swollen limbs. There was of course plenty of advice on how to sue the owner. Or take revenge on the dog.

Let's meat up...
On Thursday morning, as people trickled onto the blog, there were some confessions of feeling rather ropey after the previous night's blog meat up. Somebody chundered but nobody seemed to want to 'fess up to it. Worryingly, these nights seem to be becoming a regular occurrence. What have I done?!

If you want to join up to one of the London-based blog meat ups – generally a night to sit, drink and chat games (and war dollies if you want) – speak to resident organiser CunningStunt.

Friday Ranting – adverts
The usual Friday vitriol was reserved for the terrible adverts we see on TV nowadays. Here are some examples:

"Moonpig. Think it's the only way I can get a card to my mother before Sunday. However, their constant looping of the same annoying advert for years has built up my lava pit of hatred for them."
SuperSmashIn voices his wrath at the personalised greetings card industry

"Adverts. Go compare, We buy any car/gold, Moonpig - take a back seat. Has anyone seen the new Dove for men advert? Good. F*****g. Lord."
Uncle3en lets loose

"I've always reserved a special hatred for the poorly dubbed Glade adverts. If your products that good, why haven't you shelled out the money for decent advertising instead of getting the receptionist to speak over the smug German woman?"
Timthemonkey goes ape (see what I did there...?)

"Those Ray Winstone Radio Adverts for Volkswagen Veeeeaaaaans. '20 poun' a mumf' 'Vowkswagin Transpowtah.' Get out."
KayJayM quotes an advert I've never seen, but sounds very annoying.

This went on for some time and eventually evolved into hatred of Sunday morning show 'Something for the Weekend'. The language was such that it cannot be repeated here. (Thank goodness, my delete finger is getting tired - keef)

Quotes of the week

"Cashback - Went to the cashpoint at lunchtime and got out twenty quid, and it gave me four fivers! Incredible scenes. Had to check I wasn't in 1987 by mistake."
An exciting afternoon for Limni.

"@Whoever mentioned it was Chuck Norris' Birthday. He shares his birthday with Osama Bin Laden. Coincidence or something more sinister...?"
Robotron2000 goes all 'conspiracy theory' on us.

"Has Cunning died? Or is he still going up and down the Northern Line?"
Henrypootle's worried concern after Wednesday night's meat up.

Also discussed

Games: Battlefield Bad Company 2, Heavy Rain, Final Fantasy XIII,

Films & TV: Avatar, Hurt Locker, District 9

Welcome to: Albatri, CobraOB

It seems that the question on everyone’s mind over at SXSW this year is: What will be the next Twitter? Well, as our own Pete Cashmore said the other day during an interview with Bloomberg, and during a recent interview with Time.com’s Dan Fletcher: It’s all about location.

Twitter still remains a SXSW legend, even though some point to stats demonstrating that Twitter’s web traffic has been leveling off as of late. Still, the microblogging site asserts that it’s going as strong as ever, arguing that the true rubric for success is the number of tweets being sent out as opposed to the number of people logging on to Twitter via a web browser.

Now, location-sharing services like Foursquare seem to be creating a ton of buzz down South. Foursquare was first introduced a year ago at the SXSW conference in Austin, TX, and has only become more popular in the ensuing months — just the other day it garnered 347,000 checkins in a single day (mostly due to folks checking in in Austin). Other services like Gowalla have also joined the fray, as well as Facebook and Twitter, who have adopted or plan to adopt location features.

Check out the video below to see Pete chatting with Time at SXSW about Twitter and Foursquare, as well as how Mashable was born, the evolution of social networking, and what trends Pete sees dominating in 2010.

What do you think of the future of Twitter and the advent of location-sharing services? Let us know in the comments.

Tags: facebook, foursquare, gowalla, mashable, pete cashmore, sxsw-2010, twitter

Even though this is 2010, some people still use fax machines. There will, inevitably, be a point in your life where you have to fax something to someone. More and more people are accepting scanned documents and eSignatures, but it’s simply unavoidable. You will have to fax something.

When that time comes, it’s best to have some easy way to send a fax without having to keep some big clunky machine on your desk for the once every two year occasion you have to send a fax. First things first, what do you want to do?

Send a fax via email
Also known as “I need to send a fax but I don’t have a fax machine,” this one is really easy to fix. Well, it’s easy as long as you have a scanner. You don’t have a scanner? How are you going to send a fax? Take yourself to the nearest postal store and pay to send your fax. Ok, the rest of you have a scanner. Scan your document or whatever into a .DOC, .DOCX, or .PDF file. Then take that doc to faxZero, type in all the info, and send your fax – for free!

Receive a fax
Also known as “I need to get a fax but I don’t have a fax machine,” this has a couple of answers. First and easiest, is to go to K7.net and sign up for free. This is a free fax and voicemail service, but you can check the ‘fax tone only’ option and your number will only be answered with a fax tone. The only tricky part to this is it has (for some reason) a Washington state only option where you can only receive faxes and calls from inside Washington state. Obviously pick the other one, unless that’s you. This actually works! I got my confirmation email in a minute or two, and lo and behold you don’t have to verify anything and the number was already working! I sent myself something from faxZero and it went right through, maybe a minute and a half before I got the with the attached fax.

Now while these two options will get you through a once in a while fax scenario (for FREE!!!), they are not the most professional. The best and cheapest service online is eFax. If you get on to chat with their service reps you can pretty much get any kind of fees waived and get to their minimum $4.95 charge per month. Also, if you just have a temporary need for faxing, they have a 30 day free trial which can be canceled at any time without any charge to you.

Here is a transcript of a conversation I had with a sales rep of theirs:

You are now chatting with ‘Alexandra’

Chris: Hello I heard there was a free level of servide with eFax but I can’t seem to find it? Does it still exist?

Alexandra: yes we have a free 30 day trial Chris

Chris: Ok do I get a fax # for that 30 days? And do you need a credit card?

Alexandra: yes

Alexandra: and yes

Alexandra: Pricing depends on your usage. Can I ask how many pages you plan to send and receive per month?

Chris: just a handful, that’s why I was asking about the free service.

Chris: maybe 2-3

Chris: If I sign up for the demo and cancel before the 30 days is up is my credit card charged?

Alexandra: no, there is no contract service is month to month

So the bottom line is if you need to just send or receive a one-off fax every once in a while, there is no need for an extra phone line or clunky fax equipment. Send faxes for free with this guide, be sure to share with your friends.