Cadbury Advent Calendar: A Review

I'm not really one for chocolate. Neither am I one for spending money on useless shit like advent calendars. This year however, my significant other thought I needed to cheer the fuck up and get in the spirit of Christmas...so she bought me a Cadbury advent calendar. For those unfamiliar with the notion of an advent calendar, here's the premise: take a piece of card, cut flaps in it and then write a number on each flap (1 - 24) to represent the days of December up until Christmas Eve. On the morning (or afternoon - your choice) of each day, you open another flap. Inside the flap is usually some festive scene or a poem...or as in this case, a tiny piece of chocolate in the form of a reindeer's face. Here's a photo of my advent calendar:

I opened up flap number 3 this morning and devoured the chocolate with a ferocity approaching Jurassic Park velociraptor levels. It gave me a sharp pain in one of my teeth because I think I've got a hole or something developing back there. I didn't enjoy this pain and I cursed my own pseudo-festive gluttony, but I know for a fact that upon rising from my pit in the morning there's a 98% chance I'll rip open flap number 4 and repeat this morning's episode. That's because, unlike Pavlov's dog I never learn from my stupid, stupid mistakes. The picture on the front is quite Christmassy as far as pictures go - there's Santa dry-humping a sparsely decorated evergreen while Rudolf gets himself tangled in some fairy lights (fucking idiot). There also appear to be two elves hiding in a box containing massive chocolate renderings of Santa's own head. Santa doesn't appear to have noticed this though, or the fact that the fire in the background is roaring dangerously out of control. Also, why is Santa putting the tree up? Surely he can get the elves to do that while he reclines in a La-Z-Boy and sips Jack Daniels? What the fuck kind of operation is the child-worrying old fool running here? Mind: boggling.

Turning the calendar over reveals a full 'Christmas Team' bio, which states that the two elves are named, rather unconvincingly, Lloyd and Esther. Esther also appears to be suffering from red eye. The reindeer is called Rudy and his favourite sport is 'extreme sledging.' Santa is described as having a 'big laugh to match his belly,' but looking at him, this Santa looks fitter than most middle aged blokes - he's probably only got a 34" waist judging by these images. Something doesn't quite add up there. Maybe he keeps fit by doing an improbable number of sit ups in front of that raging inferno in the hearth, his rippling, sweat-soaked six-pack glimmering in the orange half-light while Rudy gets tangled in the fairy lights and lies there quivering and covered in his own faeces as Esther and Lloyd repeatedly skull fuck Clyde the snowman with his own carrot nose outside in the cold, dark garden. This is only hypothetical, you understand.

Rating: 7/10

Another Week in the North

Hello there. I spent the last week up in Manchester, hence the lack of posts. Sure, there are thousands upon thousands of internet cafes (probably), but it meant lugging my laptop into town on the bus and then finding somewhere that wasn't full to bursting with trendy trench-coat and luminous jean-wearing hipsters sipping mocha-choca-lattes. 

My mum’s house hasn't yet entered the digital age, so I've been in a bit of an internet dark age for the last 6 or seven days; but the main reason I went back up there was to attend a job interview. 

As I've documented several times over the last few weeks, my existence in the backwater township of Gloucester is hardly enjoyable, and so I've taken steps to relocate my ass back to where stuff actually happens and I don’t have to live in a flat with shit spread all over the inside (and occasionally the outside) of the toilet. As it turns out, I wasn't successful at the job interview but I was offered a small lifeline by the woman who interviewed me – there’s another post coming up in 4-6 weeks and they’d like to keep me in mind for it. Obviously I jumped at the chance and even though it’s not a guaranteed job offer, I'm going to throw caution to the wind, quit my current job and move home as soon as possible. It’ll probably mean crashing on my mum’s couch for a few weeks until I can get a place of my own sorted...but fuck it. What’s life about if not taking risks once in a while? Better to be on my mum’s couch (well, spare bed) than here in total isolation wrestling with boredom-induced alcoholism every night of the fucking week. 

I've already written an email to my manager offering my resignation...but judging from my previous attempts to quit, she’ll try to convince me otherwise and get me to stay. Not going to happen this time, not a chance. I just want to do my notice, hire a van and transport all my shit home (or rather, into storage). After that, I think I’ll go for a short holiday before Christmas. Cheers for the payout, Royal Navy! I was always planning on going backpacking in Thailand or somewhere when this job ended in April, but now my plans have changed I think I’ll spend a little less on a nice week away on my own somewhere instead. Europe maybe. Or possibly further afield. Don’t know yet. I just need to clear my head and then come back refreshed – get Christmas out of the way and then start getting my life and head back together without the constant feeling that I want to be somewhere else. 

My week in Manchester was also filled with lots of running (33 miles worth, in fact) and also lots of photography (several GBs worth). I've started a Flickr account and will be uploading the best of the shots I manage to squeeze out of the Fuji’s massive lens, so stay tuned for those you lucky people. Other highlights of the last week included Manchester’s Christmas market...but in all truth they were that busy that calling them a ‘highlight’ is a bit of a lie. I made the error of trying to meet a mate there on Saturday night and the sheer size of the crowds meant that we stayed for little more that 5 minutes before leaving. I shouldn’t have been surprised by the amount of people swarming about seeing as it was the payday weekend, but it was definitely the busiest I’ve ever seen the markets. I remember when I was living in Manchester before joining the navy – the Christmas markets were never like that – you literally couldn’t move in some places, such was the volume of people standing around trying to buy a glass of hot wine for a fiver or a chocolate-covered banana for some equally extortionate sum. Nevertheless, we found some decent pubs and had a good night, so it was alright in the end. 

Sunday I went to Smithfield market, which is basically the world’s biggest car boot sale...and just wandered around looking at stalls over-flowing with cheapo toys and hideous chav clothes. Didn’t buy anything (except a fucking amazing Cumberland sausage barm with mushrooms), but it was good to get out amongst the hustle and bustle of a proletariat market. But now I'm back in Gloucester. Not for long though. Not for long. Hopefully, I'll be outta here by mid December and can get on with trying to sort my life out. Exciting times ahead!

Oh, and you can check out my Flickr photo 'stream' here.

Pebbles

While I was waiting for a bus on Tuesday morning, I spotted a guy in the station doing chalk drawings of various cartoon characters on the pavement. I rummaged around in my pocket for my last remaining change and threw it in his hat as a token of good will, and then asked if I could take some photos of him at work. He obliged and I got chatting to him. His name was Pebbles, and he'd been homeless for 10 years but managed to get by on the money he collected whilst doing his pavement chalk drawings. His nickname, so he told me, came about after he started creating drawings on the beaches of the south east with pebbles and other flotsam that had washed ashore. He was a really nice bloke and is a totally self-taught artist (his words were "I can't play the guitar so I bought some chalk and taught myself to draw"), so I thought I'd post a few images of his little display from Tuesday morning.

Incidentally, when I got to Birmingham coach station later on Tuesday morning, I was bursting for a piss. I found the toilets but there was a 30p levy for using them...and I'd given all my change to Pebbles before getting on the bus. I then had to wait 40 minutes on the brink of pissing my kecks until I got on my connecting coach, whereupon I made a bee line for the stinking chemical bog at the back and unleashed a torrent of piss more akin to a fire fighter's hose jet than a human widdle. Just so you know.

Fun With Ye Olde Photoshoppe

I've been fucking around with Photoshop. It's quite an old version (Photoshop 6.0) that I nicked from my sister a few years ago, but it does the job. Have a gander at some of the edits I've made to a few of my recent photos:

This is the original

Changed to black and white and added noise

Mucked around with the colour saturation and hue

With extra lens flare added 

So yeah. Hardly award-winning shots or edits, but I'm learning new shit. Christ - I've had serious man-flu since Saturday morning and the amount of snot that's been dripping from my nose has to bee seen to be believed. It looks like the River Exe has burst it's banks on my face...and it hasn't stopped for 3 days - where the fuck is all the moisture coming from? By rights, I should look like a fucking prune right now with all the fluid that's exiting my body through my schnoz. Going for a run along Bournemouth beach in 70mph wind and lashing rain probably didn't help, but meh. I've been taking shit loads of medicine (at proper intervals, naturally), but nothing seems to be able to get rid of this damn headache, sore throat or streaming nose. I hate colds. I'm dripping snot on the keyboard now so I'm going to stop typing. Urgh.

Images of Bournemouth

Went to see Frankie Boyle at Bournemouth BIC on Friday night. He was as acerbic and offensive as usual - which is why I like his comedy so much. I'll do a full blog post about the weekend over the next few days but in the meantime, here are a few pictures I took with my new camera:

I'm starting to get the hang of the HS30 EXR now I've had a few chances to get out and play with the maual settings, but I'm probably going to invest in a digital photography guidebook and maybe even a short course in the subject. Might put a full review of the camera up here too in the next few days.

Wiidiculous

The Wii U comes out next Friday and I have to say that when it comes to hardware launches, this is the most apathetic I’ve ever been. I can pretty much recall every major hardware release since I first became interested in gaming, and only in recent years has my interest waned due to more important shit (like adult working life) getting in the way. I vaguely recall the Sega Saturn and PS1 launches, if only through the mags that I was reading at the time, but the N64 launch is particularly vivid in my mind simply because of the intense media activity, the queues in Manchester’s Market Street and the fact that one of my mates actually went and stood in line for one. His tales of fights breaking out and people being mugged for their newly acquired hardware just made me want one even more. Alas, being a broke schoolboy meant all I could do was go and play the demo machine in GAME. The next launch after that was the Dreamcast, a console that I still have a special place in my heart for, and then came the PS2, Gamecube and Xbox and then the current ones. Yadda yadda yadda. I’m not going to give you a history of gaming simply because it’s a fucking cliché and it’s been written about multiple times before by people better qualified than I to do so. What I will give you though, are my opinions on the Wii U console and the games that are launching with it. So here it is: I think the Wii U looks fucking terrible. 

The last Nintendo console I actually bought with real money (and not the glowing green rupees I pay for my grocery shopping with) was the Gamecube, and it was a fine machine that served its purpose well. After that I went towards the Xbox and 360 and have never looked back. The Wii never appealed to me simply because of the casual gamer image it assumed, and the odd ‘lifestyle’ adverts full of smiling, sockless idiots playing Wii Sports in neutrally coloured IKEA living rooms turned me completely off: was that the audience Nintendo were suddenly trying to attract after years of ‘proper’ gaming? It just alienated me is all, and my desire to own a Wii died before it even had a chance to draw a single breath. And in hindsight, I’m glad I didn’t fork out for a Wii because there’s so little of any real value there for the serious, adult gamer. Sure, there are the Zelda games and a few decent Mario offerings but where are the Mass Effects and the Halos? The serious football games and driving simulators? I want to be blowing shit up in full HD, not waving a fucking Wiimote around trying to knock hats off statues of clowns. Jesus. 

And now we have the Wii U. What the fuck were they thinking? Releasing a console with an iPad for a controller? The design of the Wii U is retarded on so many levels I barely have enough words to describe how annoyed I am at the thing’s very existence. Great – you can keep playing if somebody wants to watch TV. Er, Nintendo? It isn’t 1979 anymore - most people have more than one TV these days. And if that’s what  Nintendo are pushing as the killer feature, I have a horrible feeling that the Wii U will bomb with disastrous results. But wait – there’s more:  the Wii U uses a proprietary Blu-ray format for its games, but can’t play Blu-ray movies or DVDs. The Wii U controller pad monstrosity has a battery life of about 3 hours before it needs to be recharged. Buying a second pad will require you taking out a bank loan, and the pro controller (the one that looks like a normal control pad) isn’t compatible with every game. The console needs a software update out of the box to enable a lot of the extra features (like backwards compatibility), so if you haven’t got broadband at home...you’re fucked. These are just a few of the screw-ups I’ve been able to glean from new user reviews, and there seem to be more weird little problems everywhere you look...but the main one for me is that it just feels like a stop gap. A stop gap before the next consoles from Microsoft and Sony appear and basically redraw the console war battle lines. 

Where will Nintendo be then? I’ll wager they’ll be in exactly the same place Sega found they were in when the PS2 appeared, only without a console even half as good as the Dreamcast was compared to its rival. The Wii U does at least have HD graphics, but the two models available have pitifully small storage options (8GB and 32GB) and the technical specifications are likely to be dwarfed by the next generation Xbox and PlayStation. I don’t care that you can add external storage – the Wii U should have come with at least a 60GB hard drive and in one technical configuration. Different colours are fine, but the different versions thing is just insulting and confusing for people who aren’t really gamers (like parents buying Christmas presents, for example). 

Nintendo have really fucked up here, and I don’t think I’ll be proven wrong. The Wii U already boasts inferior visuals to most 360 games, and that’s worrying: all of the pre-release shots of ZombiU (the only game that really interested me) seem to have been mock-ups judging by footage I’ve seen in most of the video reviews flying around Youtube, and the other games that are ports of existing 360 and PS3 titles...well, opinions are mixed but who exactly are they trying to appeal to? PS3 and 360 owners who already played Mass Effect 3 and Arkham City a year ago? Quite. I want to make it clear that I’m not a Nintendo basher – I’ve owned every Nintendo console up until the Wii, but this new direction the company has taken infuriates me more than it probably should. Please Nintendo, drop the boring motion control shit, the odd controllers and the ‘we don’t care about technical specs...we care about fun’ holier-than-thou preachy bullshit. Just go back to making kick-ass, boundary-pushing games that run on a conventional, graphical ball-buster of a console. Or to put it more simply, go back to making N64s. Urgh. Just thinking about how much of a cock-up the Wii U is makes me want to punch something – why Nintendo? Why? It could have been so different. OK – you wanted to try something new with the original Wii and it paid off. Good work, but trying to draw it out and appeal to the same audience with a new hardware release that shares a name with the predecessor will only end badly. 

Confusion, poor sales and consumer alienation are probably the only things that will make Nintendo sit up and realise that actual gamers want a convention console from them. I really hope their next offering comes quickly, and there isn't a motion sensor or a tablet PC in sight.

Aperture Crazy

Was messing around with the HS30 at work this lunchtime. One of the guys I work with knows a little about photography and he gave me a 5-minute crash course in depth of field and aperture settings. The result of this uber-productive coffee break? Here:

Some are better than others, but I think you'll agree that the depth of field is pretty good in most of them. Also, I make no apologies for the really boring subject matter. It's an office...what dost thou expect?!

Check out the 'Photos' tab at the top for some examples of the HS30's night modes in action.