Cheapocrite

Not me, yesterday.

Well, it’s almost September. Where has 2012 gone? It only seems like two minutes ago I was packing up all my worldly possessions (all one suitcase of them) and heaving my ass through the gates of the naval base I called home. Those were dark days, I must admit – why anyone with half a brain cell would want to endure a lifestyle of constant degradation like that...sheesh. And then there was the whole business with the motorbike training, and the moving and then starting my new job – it seems to have all flown by so quickly.

I hope it continues to do so actually, as April 2013 marks the end of my current job (it was only ever for a year) and the start of my planned 3+ month backpacking trip to Australia. Or possibly India. Or maybe Peru/South America. I’ve not really decided where I’m going yet, but it’ll be one of those places...and Australia is winning at the moment simply because it a) looks epic; b) is sunny; and c) the least amount of fuss is required in order to do some exploring, seeing as they already (quite handily) speak a form of English there. I know Australia is a bit of a cliché and the indigenous people (well, the ‘new’ indigenous people) must get sick of all the English who turn up at their airports sporting backpacks...but fuck it. I want to go there so I’m going. Australia is also top of my list (so far) because a few of my old school friends have gone out there to start new lives, and meeting up with some fellow Mancunians on the other side of the planet just sounds ace...even if they are Man City fans. 

So 2013 then. The year of my great excursion Down Under. Goodbye England, with your miserable weather and even more miserable population! I know the old phrase ‘the grass isn’t always greener’ blah, blah fucking blah...but in this case I really don’t give a toss. I’m putting all my shit in storage, putting some clothes and other assorted stuff in a bag and then fucking off for a few months: bliss. I know I’ll have to come back at some point and that will be another grim day...but I think a break from this isle will do me good and maybe help to shift my perspective of life here. I know I moan a lot (even though a lot of it is meant to be tongue in cheek), but I know that the quality of life in the UK is amongst the best in the free world: we’ve got the NHS, clean running water, freedom of speech, electricity, the internet, roads, a free press...loads of stuff a good chunk of the rest of the world doesn’t have...it’s just that the constant greyness of everything, well – it gets me down. And I need an extended break. So I’m taking one. And I’ll more than likely document it here on this very blog so people back home can see what I’m up to...so there’s also that to look forward to, you lucky lot!

In other news, the Paralympics had its opening ceremony last night. I didn’t watch it though – I was too busy listening to the bombcast (Giant Bomb’s vaguely games-related and funny as hell podcast), while playing NOVA 2 on my PlayBook. I seem to have become a massive fucking hypocrite in recent weeks: if you’d suggested to me, in say June, that in August I’d be playing on a tablet PC whist listening to my iPod, I’d probably have spat bile in your face. The June version of me would have said that tablets were a waste of time and that iPods are a piece of shit because they break so easily (I’ve owned several – look through the archived posts of yore for details of their individual demise). So yeah, I’m a hypocrite – but the facts of the matter come down to me also being a tightwad. The PlayBook was £129, and the iPod was £30. Bargains, I think you’ll agree. If I’d been offered either device at their full price, the aforementioned bile would again be raging up my oesophagus with a view to landing on the facial region of the seller. So, with that in mind, I’m not simply a hypocrite – I’m a cheapocrite. Which is something else entirely. So there.

Iron Lion Essex

So the lion that several people saw and heard roaming the Essex countryside has been explained away by the police as a large cat. Not to be confused with a ‘big cat,’ just a ‘large’ common or garden cat. This has been backed up by a woman who claims said cat is hers – and it is indeed a big cat...but big enough to be confused with a lion? I’m not convinced. Regardless, the search appears to have been called off...but what if all the unconnected witnesses who are adamant that they saw a fucking lion rolling around and cleaning itself in a field; and the other unconnected witnesses who say they heard a lion roar...what if they were right all the long and there actually is a lion on the loose in rural Essex? There haven’t been any reports of people being mauled yet and no reports of mutilated cattle or sheep being discovered, so maybe the police are right in calling off the search – after all, keeping two helicopters in the air and having 30 coppers occupied by walking through woodland is probably costing the taxpayer a pretty penny.

I remember a similar story some time last year. Apparently somebody had spotted a leopard/tiger/lion in a field (can’t remember where exactly) and the police went into overdrive sending a freaking  SWAT team and a load of helicopters and shit down there...only to find it was a particularly large stuffed toy. I also recall a story from my youth that has echoes of all this shit – apparently somebody in Wigan had reported seeing a big cat with a cub in some trees whilst out dog walking. You know the drill – police launch hunt, local news gets involved...and lo and behold they find a dead lioness by a reservoir. They didn’t find the cub though.

So the Essex lion (as it’s now known). Fact or fiction? Who knows...it’s got a Twitter feed though, so it must have a WiFi connection or a mobile. 

Tying in to all this bollocks, I saw a fantastic documentary on Channel 4 a few weeks back Called America’s Animal Hoarder, which told the story of some bloke in America (surprise) that had amassed this menagerie of lions, tigers and bears (oh my!) on his farm. He (Terry Thompson) was a bit of a local character by all accounts...and the population of Zanesville, Ohio discovered this first hand after Terry let all his animals out of their cages and then shot himself. Cue wild beasts of all description bounding through the countryside, through neighbourhoods and across the highway. When the local police dept started getting calls from people locked in their houses because bears were eating their garden fences, they rolled out and took back the streets in the only way they knew how: by emptying several thousand rounds of ammunition into animal flesh. It’s actually a really powerful documentary and I honestly recommend you watch it. Even though this all took place in October 2011 I can’t remember seeing it on the news, even though there are clips of BBC News reports in the programme. Weird.

It’s also interesting to note that the police conducting  the search in Essex for what was potentially a lion on the loose were armed with...well nothing, while the American rozzers happened to have assault weapons in the boots of their patrol cars. I don’t know why it’s interesting...but y’know. Comparisons and all that shit. In other news, I bought a second hand 30GB iPod classic yesterday for £30. It’s really cool. I'm actually listening to a 'podcast' right now. But that’s enough about iPods. Cough.

Phone Home

Ah, Bank Holiday weekends. Gotta love the free day off work...gotta hate going back to work when you’re completely out of the work ‘zone.’ And as per usual, it fucking lashed it down all day pretty much. Cheers, weather. Here – have a free day off work, but don’t even think about doing anything with it, as it’ll be pissing down and blowing a gale. Has it ever been nice on a Bank Holiday in the entire recorded history of Bank Holidays? I wonder. I wonder if some secret govt dept chooses which days to make Bank Holidays solely on the inside information the Met Office supplies: if it’s pretty much guaranteed to be the shittiest day of the month – Bank Holiday time. Yeah, we’ll give the proletariat scum a day off from pushing the futile millstone of life...but they’ll be fucked if they can actually enjoy it. 

Suppose I shouldn’t complain too much – there’s a fucker of a hurricane whipping up across the pond. It won’t be long before we’re getting them here though if the current trend of miserable weather continues. Can you imagine how we’d cope?! Jesus. This country can barely cope with a bit of snow...if we had to contend with hurricanes and the other bitch slaps that Mother Nature hands out to the rest of the world, we’d be shafted. Christ...just think about that. If an earthquake hit one of our major cities what would happen? Sure – the Great Britain of, say, the 1940s would probably stand firm and unite to rectify the damage...but today? Nah. Looting, rioting, uncontrollable malaise and general chaos. It’d be hell on Earth. 

Interestingly, I was reading something online the other day about this thing called the Brookings Report. The Brookings Report (also known by its proper title: Proposed Studies on the Implications of Peaceful Space Activities for Human Affairs) was a paper commissioned by NASA in the 1960s which, as the name suggests, looked at the implications of peaceful space activities for human affairs. One tiny chapter of the report is what makes it interesting though – the bit where the various egghead authors speculate on the effect of the discovery of intelligent extra-terrestrial life on the general population of the planet. Seriously – this thing exists. Google it and look at the entry on Wikipedia. The fact that a body as important as NASA thought to even contemplate such a study is very interesting and throws up all kinds of questions...the main one being: how the fuck would the hoi polloi react if intelligent life was discovered? Or if it discovered us? 

In my experience, most people scoff at the idea of aliens existing. They live in this confident little bubble of ignorance, reinforced by years of movies and mass-media demonisation of the notion of the existence of extra-terrestrial life. Anyone who believes in aliens is a bit ‘loopy,’ and all aliens are ‘little green men’ who fly around in saucers. But look at the facts: NASA actually took this shit seriously way back in the 60s, and numerous experts in the science world bemoan the way in which humanity is so desperate to broadcast our whereabouts to the stars, either through our radio signals or by putting gold discs on our satellites that actually point the way to our mineral-rich little world. 

The brain-dead morons who permeate our everyday lives and who blindly go through every day believing that humanity is alone in the universe are the ones who this report predicts will not be able to handle the discovery of a superior intelligence if (and when) it comes. Forget the hypothetical earthquake hitting Birmingham or London...can you imagine if a twatting mothership landed on Wimbledon common and a super-intelligent army of 4-dimensional fire-breathing puddles came sloshing out of the hatch? Full blown hysteria – that’s what. Sadly Apone, Hudson, Hicks and rest of the absolutely badass crew of the USS Sulaco haven’t been born yet so we’d probably have no choice but to be enslaved by these new inviscid masters; but at least NASA could take the moral ‘we told you so’ high ground. Which is nice for them. Bastards.

The Stayt of Play

Hello. I feel like a fucking zombie. Woke up at 3.30am this morning and couldn't get back to sleep, so I just fired up my PlayBook and spent the next few hours watching retro games reviews on YouTube and playing the really rather excellent port of Duke Nukem 3D. I knew this would happen though – as soon as I got to my desk at work I knew I’d feel like shit and want to close my eyes, if only for a second, and drift off. I've just had a cup of coffee and I feel no different. What is it with coffee? Don’t get me wrong – I fucking love the stuff – but why are we constantly told that it’s a stimulant? Every time I drink it because I need to stay awake...I just end up falling asleep. Same goes for energy drinks – I rarely drink them, but when I do, I don’t feel any different. They’re a scam. Actually, just while I’m thinking about this subject, I do recall watching a documentary on TV a few weeks ago (Panorama, BBC 1) that investigated the murky world of ‘sports’ and ‘energy’ drinks, and it found no conclusive evidence that they have any beneficial properties whatsoever. What the journalist conducting the study did find, however, was that the vast majority of them are full of sugar (shock!)...and the ones that claim to be ‘low calorie’ (like Powerade Zero et al) are actually paradoxical by design: they offer an energy boost but contain either low or zero calories. Interesting, and well worth a watch if you can find it on iPlayer.

Still on the subject of energy drinks, what is with those massive ‘Monster’ cans that people from a certain social strata always seem to be carrying around these days? Surely, life on the dole (c’mon, it’s usually chavs you spot drinking the foul-smelling shit) can’t be that physically demanding that you need to walk around Primark with a half-litre can of Monster Energy, just in case you collapse from over exertion? Saying that though, most of the females usually have huge hoop earrings weighing their heads down, massively over-laden prams and a gaggle of hyper-active, fatherless screaming brats to control, so maybe their reliance on Monster Energy is justified.

The same Panorama episode also investigated whether or not specialised running shoes actually had any bearing on the quality of a runner’s exercise...again, the answer was inconclusive...which I can kind of appreciate, as over the years I have spent an inordinate amount of money on various brands of running shoes. From extensive experience, I can confirm that in the main, they’re all pretty much the same and I’ve sustained injuries regardless of the particular brand I was wearing at the time. I currently own four pairs – a pair of Brooks, a pair of Adidas and two pairs of Saucony...and to be honest I can pick any pair at random and go for a run and not feel any benefit or disadvantage. Obviously, if I was a track runner then I suppose I’d get some benefit from wearing spikes, but just road running? I don’t think it really matters what you’ve got on your feet and this investigation by Panorama kind of laid bare the way in which sports companies dupe us out of our cash. Bastards.

When I eventually put the PlayBook down this morning and put the TV on, I was confronted by the usual glut of non-news on BBC Breakfast, but one item caught my attention: basically, so the story goes, Tesco has finally conceded to the other supermarkets and agreed to start putting those colour-coded ‘health meter’ things on its own-brand food packaging. To be honest, I didn’t even notice that they didn’t, but hey. BBC Breakfast thought that this was a big enough development in current affairs to devote a good 20 minute slot to it, and pulled out the full works for us news-hungry viewers: a load of vox pops of people giving their opinions on the food ‘traffic light’ system (filmed on Oxford Road in Manchester, I happened to notice (probably because they’re based at Salford now...sorry, just thinking out loud)), a special pre-recorded explanation of the colour-coding system, and finally a studio interview with some pencil neck from an irrelevant food-based government department and (I shit you not) a random woman who was simply described in her name caption as ‘a mother.'

It wasn’t all this over the top bollocks that bemused me though, oh no. It was Charlie Stayt (you know, the presenter who farted live on air a while back sending the guest into hysterics while he tried to pretend it hadn’t happened) struggling to get his ridiculously coiffed head around the notion of a ‘traffic light’ system on food packaging. Does he live in a parallel dimension or something? You can’t go into a shop without seeing these labels on food nowadays (unless it’s Tesco, obv), so how has Charlie Stayt not seen them? For fuck sake – there was a massive picture of the kind of labels I’m on about stuck on the monitor behind him! All he had to do was turn around and he’d have seen what everyone was talking about! For those of you who live on Charlie Stayt’s country estate (poetry!), here’s what I’m blathering about:

Yes? You see them on everything? Jesus Charlie – you should get out more. Stop sending the butler to Waitrose for your weekly shop, mate*. I’m clearly writing bollocks now, so I’m going to go for another coffee and a lie down. Zzzzzzzz.

*This is a polite little notice to those people (I know of at least one) who will go and Wikipedia Charlie Stayt and then come back here to comment about his less than glamorous lifestyle and numerous previous jobs. They'll inevitably state (!) that he's done well for himself and that I should leave him alone. I agree. He's done well for himself and is a damned good interviewer. All the stuff written up there is written off the cuff as I see it unfolding. So kindly take your Wikipedia-searching app and shove it up your arse.

Be Free. Be Facefree.

Today I’m going to talk about Facebook again. Now, I’ve been off the Facebook radar for over a year now and I honestly don’t miss it. Fuck – I don’t even think about it unless somebody mentions it at work or I’m walking down the street and over hear a fat, bleach blonde slag shouting at her spotty, tracksuit-clad wastrel of a boyfriend about a status update he made. This is actually more common than you’d imagine. So yeah, in my absence, Facebook continues to control the lives of every semi-sentient being on the planet. After my yearlong self inflicted exile from the hideous construct, I feel that I’m a living and breathing beacon of hope for those people (i.e. everyone I know) who feel that their lives wouldn’t be worth living without being able to tag themselves, upload a ‘zany’ photo or comment on some boring drivel somebody else with half a brain managed to compose. You may (or may not) be aware of a damning summary I wrote condemning everyone’s favourite social networking site a few years ago, so I apologise if this post is covering old ground, but I just wanted to show you that removing Facebook from your life is possible...and even makes the arduous task of simply existing that little bit more enjoyable/less abhorrant.

The main reason retards give me for wanting to remain on Facebook is that it helps them stay in contact with people. I personally think this is a load of bullshit. Bullshit that has subsequently been put into a food processor and blended with used tampons and then poured into pie case made out of pastry where the water has been substituted for piss. And then baked in an oven in Fred West’s kitchen. In hell. What I’m saying is that this excuse is feeble. Look at the facts – I’ve been off the cunting thing for about 15 months and everyone I want to speak to, I speak to. I text. I email. Fuck – there’s people in Australia I speak to every other day! Am I on Facebook? No.

The other prize reason people give for maintaining a presence on the infernal thing is that you can keep track of invites to events. This is also crap – I go to plenty of social events and if people require my attendance, they’ll ring me or text me...or God fobid – tell me to my face!

You may think that this renewed attack on Facebook has just come out of the ether, but I’m writing it because of something that’s happened at work. Basically, I was asked whether I’d be interested in maintaining or setting up a Facebook page for a project that I’m a part of (seeing as I’m the ‘computery bloke’), and I refused point blank with a ferocity verging on the insane. This shocked most of my colleagues to the point that a full blown discussion erupted and people where generally aghast that I’m not ‘on’ Facebook and am such a staunch anti-Facebookist (another new phrase introduced to the English Language, right there people). I’ve even gone as far as deleting the inbuilt Facebook apps on my PlayBook and mobile phone, and decided not to buy a HTC ChaCha mobile because it has a Facebook hardkey on it. Yes, my casual hatred runs that deep.

Fair enough – I ‘do’ Twitter, but only because it’s still a little bit niche amongst the general population; quite a large proportion of people still don’t see the point, and of course, you can’t go snooping through people’s photograph collections making sarcastic comments.

I don’t think I’ll ever be completely rid of Facebook – indeed, a friend texted me yesterday to say he’d used one of my infamous sms-based diatribes as a status update – but I’ll do my damnedest to remain free from its evil grip and will continue to campaign that my nearest and dearest rid themselves of it too.

For me, there’s no more getting annoyed about something shitty somebody wrote on my wall; no more cringing at photographs I’d rather not have broadcast to the entire planet; no more feeling the urge to write a pathetic, attention seeking status update when I’m feeling a bit pissed off (I just do it on here instead). People, generally, are cunts to each other and Facebook gives most of them a shield to hide behind and a sword to attack with. The ignorance that not being a user offers is tantamount to sheer mental bliss. And it can be achieved with just one little click of your mouse. Do it now. Release yourself.

Be Facefree, like me.

A Tribute to Mean Machines

 

I may have touched on this before in a post of yore, but I’m a massive advocate of video games. And by ‘advocate,’ I mean that I love them. Ever since me and my brother got an Amstrad 464 Plus for our birthday (it must’ve been our 10^th if I remember rightly), I’ve been hooked. Obviously, gaming has moved on exponentially since then – we had to put cassette tapes into the fucking thing to load the games and then go away for half an hour while a crappy bitmap ‘loading’ screen constructed itself line by line on the screen. And people complain about loading times on consoles today...

Anyway, that Amstrad with its wank graphics (even for the time, they were shite) planted in me the seeds of a computer games geek, and from then on I don’t think there’s ever been a period in my life where I’ve not owned one console or another. Indeed, by the time I left University I had about 12 different consoles in my room – it looked like a suicide bomber had detonated themselves in a branch of Gamestation (well, the queues do get quite bad on a Saturday afternoon). It wasn’t just playing the games that interested me though – it was everything about the subject, which eventually and inevitably led to me become addicted to buying games magazines. You see, back in the early nineties there was no internet, so the only place you could get new info on games and read reviews and get cheats etc was in the magazines, so naturally I had to embrace them as my only source of vital information ‘leaking’ out of such exotic sounding gaming locations as ‘America’ and ‘Japan.’ I say there was no internet – there was, just about, but getting online meant going to the school IT classroom at lunchtime, opening up Netscape Navigator on one of the dogshit slow workstations and waiting 3 days for Alta Vista (remember that?!) to pop up on the screen. No thanks. Not when there was football to be played in the car park.

So magazines were heavily relied on for gaming news, and the one I bought most often? Mean Machines Sega. It was an amazing journal full of lewd jokes and witty articles, and probably the magazine that made me want to ditch the hum drum life of a school kid and become a rich and famous games journo. There were several other mags I used buy at around the same time (CVG, Sega Power and GamesMaster – the former two now defunct, while GamesMaster is on life support) and they all promoted this notion that writing about games for a living was the equivalent of being an international playboy – jetting off to L.A. for a games convention, being wined and dined by publishers trying to sway your opinion on a new game, getting loads of cool free stuff...it just seemed amazing, and I wanted a piece of the action. Sadly, as I grew up I realised that the view I had was slightly askew and then real life got in the way and the dream died (as did the print magazine industry – damned pesky Netscape Navigator!), but I’ll always remember those mags as a key component of my childhood; indeed, the prose within is most likely what led to my sense of humour being what it is today.

Now, I’d been planning to write about this subject for a while and kept putting it off, but last night while randomly web surfing (surfing...navigating...there’s a theme here somewhere) I came across a website that almost made me cry with delight: The Mean Machines Archive! Yes, that’s right – somebody has gone to the trouble of distilling what made Mean Machines such a fantastic magazine and condensed it all into one amazing website! I couldn’t believe it when I found this site: all the memories came flooding back. It gets even weirder though – check this shit out. After looking at that archive for a while, I logged in to Twitter and one of the ‘suggested’ tweeters who popped up in the sidebar was Julian Rignall, a former staff member at Mean Machines! I sent him a message asking if he was the same person from the mag, and he replied that it was...and this sparked a slightly surreal Twitter conversation about the good ol’ days – y’know, how games mags aren’t the same anymore and how the humour has gone from the writing. 

It was all very strange – to have been sat on the couch thinking about Mean Machines Sega, finding a website dedicated to it, and then ending up chatting to one of the core journalists from the mag...like I said: strange. He was a very nice bloke and to him and all of the other journalists from that era (Gus Swan, Marcus Hawkins, Ed Lomas, Martin Kitts, Tim Weaver, Jes Bickham, Richard Leadbetter, Jonathan Davies and many, many more (is it sad that I remember all these names?!)), I say thank you. You probably have no idea how inspirational your games-related ramblings really were.

A Right Royal Clusterfuck

They say a picture speaks a thousand words. They, whoever 'they' are could have a point. What these words are though, I have no idea. After uploading yesterday's flurry of Manchester-themed photos, I was looking through the Pictures folder on my laptop and I came across this:

It's a bit of a random one, but these are the words that it speaks: I took this while I was getting ready to march out of some barracks in London on the day of the Royal wedding last year. I was part of the naval contingent who lined the street immediately outside Westminster Abbey, and we had to march through London to the Abbey and do all the rifle drill etc. on the march. If you look closely, you can see Prince William on the TV screen - we were all watching the proceedings on BBC News before we went outside to form into our companies and march down to Westminster. We did 2 weeks of drill training prior to the event, which involved 'learning' how to stand still for up to 3 hours at a time - which sounds easy enough, but try it holding an SA80 rifle...they're light enough initially, but after a while it feels like you're holding a particularly large cartoon anvil under your arm.

The march out to Westminster went well enough, and to be honest I actually felt quite patriotic seeing all the crowds and all the Union flags fluttering in the morning breeze. The whole world was watching and it felt quite amazing to be part of the event. Obviously, I missed the actual ceremony because I was stood motionless outside Westminster Abbey as it was going on, but I did see a Horse Guard get flung from his horse right in front of me as it reared up - that shit was worth the admission alone. After the Royals came out we did the salute as they went past in their carriages, then we all 'fell in' and attempted to march back to the barracks with the Royal Marines band playing music ahead of us. Unfortunately, we hadn't rehearsed this at all and we were all out of step: it was a total clusterfuck and I wanted to die of embarrassment - but you've got to take the rough with the smooth I suppose. Except when it comes to peanut butter: in that case, it's never smooth. Always crunchy. But I digress.

I'm not a royalist or anything, but to be involved in the day was quite special and there aren't a lot of people who can claim to have been involved in a Royal wedding.