The first time the player-controlled Jack, in BioShock, picks up a Plasmid, wretches and screams, we know he has been painfully, irretrievably changed.
The teams changed ends painfully for the last quarter hour, and we read the weariness in their movements, in the relief with which they passed the ball to a colleague.
For years I had painfully tried to change my body.
These days, it's not quite like that, of course, and the President, once he gets home, will be frequently and painfully reminded of what has changed.
"It's not as if anything in all of pukey human history has ever changed because some painfully brilliant person wrote down their ideas," a narrator says in her second collection of stories, "Liberty's Excess".
So here we are, three years after I wrote that "right now Facebook's video creation tool is painfully outdated," and nothing has changed.
Now, a decade of painfully wrought change appears to be paying off for Russia.
This applies to the Nice treaty, as it contains a series of painfully negotiated changes to European institutions that were designed to ensure that they will still be able to function in a much bigger Union.All EU treaties have to be ratified by every member state, but Irish voters have already rejected Nice once in a referendum last year.
Painfully, technological change always leaves some workers behind.
The 1960s changed Irish culture, often painfully.
