If you missed the chance to come to Block Party last year, you're in luck - the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge is hosting two events which will give you the chance to get your geek on.

Firstly, you'll get the opportunity on the weekend of the 25th and 26th February to learn more about the arcane art of teletext - and meet some of the luminaries of this resurgent medium. Gurus Dan Farrimond, Steve "Horsenburger" Horsley and Raquel Meyers will be in attendance - and you can find out more details here. 

The following weekend, on Saturday 4th March, the Centre will be hosting a charity retro comedy night, full of geeky comedy from YouTube sensation Ashens, plus stand-up from the likes of Paul Gannon, Ash Frith, Iszi Lawrence and Richard Sandling. Apparently, I'm hosting it - and it'll be your first opportunity to see clips from Mr Biffo's Found Footage.

The show will begin at 7pm and last for around 90 minutes. Advance tickets are just £10 each for this unique opportunity to see such an eclectic pool of comic talent. The Centre will be open to ticket holders from 6pm to 10pm to allow you to enjoy the exhibits and test your gaming skills on the consoles and arcade machines. Drinks will be available from a fully licensed bar provided by Lord Conrad's Brewery.
This event will be recorded and broadcast live on the Centre’s YouTube channel.

Buy tickets here.

In the meantime... here's Quiz-Me-Do from last year's Block Party Digifest.
​

I'm from the generation that was born long after World War 2, yet is still old enough to have a link to that era through my grandparents. 

Though my dad's mum had died before I was born, his father continued to live in the house they'd bought on a leasehold back before the war. It didn't look like it had changed at all in the intervening decades - barring the removal of the Morrison air raid shelter which once doubled as a dining table.

The furniture, the decor - there was even a big, iron, range in the kitchen... I see these reality shows where families go "back in time" to spend a couple of weeks living like we did in the 30s, 40s or 50s... and just think "Oh - it looks like Grandad Rose's house". 

My maternal grandparents' home was similar. They lived in a little rented bungalow with those lace doily things on the backs of their sofas, a pantry full of powdered mustard and custard, and a mangle in the garden, which I presume my nan used to wring out clothes, rather than flatten rats. My grandad had been a mechanic and chimneysweep - he still had his old brushes in the shed, should he ever fancy clambering up on the roof for an impromptu Cockney sing-a-long.

They had single-glazing, and in winter the house would get savagely cold - with frost on the inside of the windows. Getting from one room to another was a case of legging it between pockets of warmth, provided by a number of paraffin heaters placed in doorways. Most of the time, though, we just stayed in the kitchen, where the coal fire was always burning. 

I remember my Nan getting up before dawn most mornings to prepare it for the coming day. We'd fetch in the coal from outside, I'd help her brush out the ash from the previous day's fire, scrunch up some newspaper as a firelighter, add some kindling, and then the coal. There was something comforting about the semi-ritualistic way we'd go about it. 

I've no doubt that their life was tougher in lots of ways than we have it now - I mean, they lived through a full-on World War for pity's sake (though the closest my grandad came to action was hiding in a tank - albeit a watertank  - from some Germans).

​The Cuban Missile Crisis, the Cold War, recessions and rationing and energy crises... the 20th Century wasn't easy. But, I speculate, much of that felt like a step up from having bombs dropped on you... and between those moments of historic awfulness we made progress.

Massive advances in medicine and communications, the advent of the Welfare State... an increase in leisure time - not to mention the social changes which took us closer than ever to equality for all. 

I don't think it's entirely nostalgia talking when I say that in a lot of ways it feels preferable to where we find ourselves at now...

Back when I was a child, Mr Potato Head was little more than a box of plastic bits with spikes on, that you'd ram into an actual tuber. Now, of course, health and safety has literally gone mad, and no toy manufacturer is permitted to sell products which encourage turning organic matter into playthings.

This is why we no longer have such toys as Rudyard Raw-Meat, Andrew Albumen-Hair, and Shitwheels.

Once upon a time, though, Mr Potato Head manufacturer Hasbro sought to expand its range of potato-headed products into other foodstuffs... not just fruit and vegetables - but meat also. Here are Mr Potato Head's forgotten friends...

As you may have read in my review-in-progress, I had a little bit of an issue when it came to playing Resident Evil 7 on the PlayStation VR headset. Actually, quite a big bit of an issue, given that on my first go I came within one retch of forcefully expelling the contents of my stomach.

It's with a degree of regret that I report that the issue didn't really go away. More than any other game I've played on the PSVR, Resident Evil makes me feel sick.

I accept that, maybe, it's because I hadn't played anything in VR since the autumn, and my tolerance threshold has been reset. Or maybe there's something fundamentally wrong with VR which means it doesn't work so well with some people. The jury is out.

Fact is: I can't play Resident Evil 7 in VR for more than half an hour without sweating profusely and feeling nauseous. Hilariously, that nausea then stays with me at a low level until I go to bed. Frankly, it's a massive, massive, shame - because, without a shadow of a doubt, the scariest version of Resident Evil 7 is the VR version of Resident Evil 7.

But hey - how is it for those who didn't fork out for a piece of hardware seemingly designed to make them do a big blow-off (vomit)? 

Created in 1976 by US toy giant Kenner, Stretch Armstrong was something of a late-70s phenomenon. And for good reason: if there's one thing boys desire more than anything, it's being able to tug on a pudgy, semi-naked man who wears a pair of skin-tight rubber pants, and is seemingly untroubled by nipples.

With his supple membrane filled to the throat with corn syrup, pliable Armstrong could - as his name implied - be stretched up to five or six feet... and remain at that size for a few moments, before slowly returning to his original flaccid dimensions. It was a simple but effective concept.

​Indeed, he was even easier to manipulate than an apricot-skinned emotionally-volatile egomaniac with narcissistic personality disorder, who got voted into high office on the mistaken belief that he'd finally get the respect and validation he's spent his entire life craving, yet is so lacking any real convictions of his own that he'll do whatever the hell his advisers tell him to do, so long as he thinks it'll raise cheers from his voter base.

As Netflix prepares to launch a new Stretch Armstrong animated TV series, here's a gallery of classic Stretch Armstrong toys. What do you think the chances are that we'll get through it without making any suggestive jokes...? Mostly likely low.

Nobody really likes being sick. If you throw up, something has gone very badly wrong. You're ill, physically or mentally, or you've had too much to drink.

The most I ever threw up in one sitting - more a hunching - was when I was 18. I'd been to the pub with a friend, and gotten a little carried away. When I returned home, I ate a 12 pack of Walkers crisps, and almost immediately upon swallowing the final crisp, I regurgitated the entire lot onto my bedroom floor.

Small mercies; my room was in the process of being redecorated. I was sleeping on a mattress, on a bare hardwood floor. This meant that there wasn't a great deal of height to my hurl - so no real splatter pattern - and no carpet to absorb any of the vom. Instead, it lay there on the floor, a beige cone of pulped Walkers, in roughly the circumference of a 12-inch single. I remember it came to a pleasing point, like a pinched turd.

In my profoundly addled state, I went and got a towel from the bathroom, in a hamfisted attempt to dry-mop the mess. I succeeded only in smearing it around the hardwood. Further towels - every towel in the bathroom, in fact - were required to remove the last of the spew, but this resulted in the unpleasant realisation that I now had half a dozen towels full of potato crisp-ruminate.

Unfortunately, I had no idea how to use the washing machine - doing so would've only raised suspicion in any event - so I hit upon a slick plan to hide the evidence of my drinking. Stark naked, I walked downstairs, straight past my father - who was busy watching TV, oblivious to his drunk, nude spawn - half a dozen heavy puke-towels in my arms. I strode confidently into the garden, and threw the lot over the fence into next door.

​Not an easy task; the waist-high fence had recently been replaced with a six foot-high one, after Mr Benson had accused my sister of setting fire to his garden.

Head throbbing, I was woken early the next morning by my irate mother, wanting to know why all of our towels were hanging, encrusted in barf, from Mr Benson's apple tree. I was then forced to endure the further indignity of retrieving the towels with a broom, while standing on a chair.

​Stick with me. This is all relevant. 

Resident Evil VII is, by all accounts, a return to form for the series, following the mixed critical reactions to its two predecessors. The franchise's twisty-turn-y ongoing storyline, involving the shadowy machinations of the Umbrella Corporation - a corporation that, presumably, started out making umbrellas, before moving into hazardous chemicals - is 21 years old this year.

But... did you know that there haven't just been seven Resident Evil games? As well as the Zeroes, and the Code Veronicas, and the Nemeses, there have been many, many others. Too many to count in fact, if you're as lazy as I am.

Here are just a few of the most obscure entries in the franchise - and to keep things moving along, there are reactions to each of the games from Zippy the Monkey. You go, Zippy!

I thought long and hard about whether to write about this.

I mean, aside from anything else I'm already aware that Digi2000 has been a bit light on actual games content recently.... albeit with good reason; there's bugger all going on this month, games-wise, apart from the release of Resident Evil VII. I'll get to that in due course.

Nonetheless, I've not hidden away from sharing things on this site which matter to me, and I don't want to feel too scared to speak up - for fear of being damned by those whose aims and beliefs I support - when I feel strongly about an issue. If you're a regular reader you'll know I tend to wear my heart on my sleeve, and... last week something happened which is going to affect us all one way or another. You don't need me to state what it was.

I managed to catch the swearing in of President Trump on Friday evening, just before I headed into London to see Stewart Lee do a stand-up show - a more liberal bubble you couldn't hope for.

I left the house with a knot in my stomach, like something really, really bad had happened. You know that scene in Star Wars, where Ben Kenobi has to have a bit of a sit-down after Alderaan gets blown-up? Yeah, well... that was me on Friday evening. I couldn't put my finger on it, but it felt like a dark shadow had crossed the sun. If I'd been writing that moment in a screenplay I'd have added thunder in the stage directions.

I woke on Saturday feeling bleak, and swiftly my Twitter feed just made me feel worse. It was pretty much given over to one thing and one thing only: the American neo-Nazi Richard Spencer getting punched in the face live on the news.

Almost without exception, everyone on there was celebrating. That knot in my gut tightened. 

​The world had gone mental.

Nowadays, the only thing you can buy via mail order is Russian brides, apparently. Back before American industry all went overseas, and the American landscape became dotted with abandoned factories like tombstones, you could buy almost anything by mail order. And here are ten of those things.

Poor old The Dukes of Hazzard. When I was a kid, I thought it was simply a TV show about two good ol' boys who were meaning no harm. We now live in more enlightened times, and it has become apparent retrospectively that it was actually depicting the everyday adventures of some good 'ol racists. Their choice of vehicle, a 1969 Dodge Charger, boasted an iconic horn sound which may as well have been a dog whistle.

My generation didn't know what the flag on the top of the car represented, or that it was named after Robert E. Lee - the Confederate General who led his troops into battle for the right to continue using slave labour.

Though to the best of my knowledge there were never any explicit references to the Dukes being bad racists, or dialogue supporting the secession of the Southern States and a return to treating black people as property, modern wisdom has all but consigned the show to history. Suffice to say, many who grew up with the show are outraged at what they view as an act of politically-correct censorship.

The defence of the symbolism in The Dukes of Hazzard runs along the same sort of lines as when your mum or nan get on their high horse about the Robinson's jam gollywog; "We grew up with it, and we never realised that a grotesquely caricatured depiction of a black man was actually meant to be a black man"/"We never realised that the Confederate flag which they used during the American Civil War - a war fought about slavery - actually had anything to do with slavery." 

Looking back now, it's all a bit embarrassing, frankly, and here are ten items of Dukes of Hazzard merchandise which hindsight casts in a ghastly light.

Poor old Star Trek. For me, it was always a sad relation to Star Wars. Whereas Star Wars felt scrappy and bonkers and exciting, Star Trek was always far too talky. I mean, I watched it growing up - we all did. Even The Next Generation. And I quite like the JJ Abrams reboot.

But there was always a part of me that found the TV show a bit preachy and worthy. I mean... in The Next Generation one of the main characters was the ship's counsellor, for pity's sake. I didn't want "Claire Rayner in Space"...!

Still, at least the merchandise failed to reflect the touchy-feely tone of the show. In fact, most of it barely reflected the show at all...

In case you missed it, Valve boss Gabe Newell did an AMA on Reddit yesterday. The question of Half-Life 3 was, inevitably, raised - and we got the closest yet to a confirmation of new Half-Life activity. 

Well... sort of. Ish. A bit.

When asked if Valve were working on a new game set in the Half-Life/Portal universe, Newell replied with a simple "yep", before going on to confirm that the company was working on some sort of Half-Life/Portal movie project with JJ Abrams, a new single-player game, and a "full-sized" VR game.

Which many have speculated, without a great deal of evidence, is Half-Life or Portal-related.

You know: because nature abhors an information vacuum, and "people are stupid" (not my words - but the words of the pop singer Boy George; don't shoot the messenger).

For me, though, the most interesting remark from Newell was this: "The issue with Half-Life for me is that I was involved in a much higher percentage of the decisions about the games, so it's hard for me to look at them as anything other than a series of things I regret."

And in one fell swoop my feelings regarding Half-Life were turned on their head. That's right; their head.

​That's the literal opposite of the bum!