Can I just take a moment to say 'I love you'.
I'm not sure I live on the same planet as the characters in all the American movies who imbue this timeless phrase with some sort of undue stature. Yes they're powerful words, if you mean them, but when did they become a loaded gun to be kept under lock and key lest they be accidentally discharged by a small child or other disaffected youth? Now I know you can say 'i love you' in a non-romantic context, and I'm not here to talk about how 'love is a doing word' or, as the Matrix would have us believe, 'just a word applied to a feeling', but it's less with its real life use and more about its fictional use in movies and TV shows that I have a commentary.
I'll admit I'm a bit late in commenting on this strange phenomena - I remember shows of the 90s like 'Friends' where saying 'I love you' was some sort of 'next step' in a relationship. Of course, in the secular relationship stepladder it goes 'first date, first kiss, first shag, 'i love you', moving in together and then maybe marriage and kids etc'. I'm not here to comment on how totally screwed up that order is (in my mind), but it's not that I believe the saying of those three words should come earlier in the chain, but more that I'm not sure they need to be a step in the chain at all. All that making a big deal out of telling somebody you love them says to me is that we collectively brand everybody as emotional cripples, unable to tell the ones we love of our true feelings. Are we? I don't think I am... if anything I find myself the opposite, holding these 'feelings' for a huge multitude of people, both romantically and non-romantically, and although I don't necessarily go around shouting it from the rooftops, I'd hope they were shown in my actions towards the people I love. And were I ever in a position to tell somebody that I loved them in a romantic context, I'm not sure I'd have any quarms in doing so. Does that make me abnormal? I don't think so. And I don't think I'm the only one in this situation.
So why, then, do movies, tv shows and the media in general still make such a huge deal out of people saying these words to one another? Is it actually an issue for certain people in reality? Or is it just another gap in the warring realities of fictional stories and the true world in which we live?? The same gap that tells young, impressionable minds that everybody they know is living the lives of people 10 years their senior? I don't want to go into a diatribe over how wrong it is for the media to paint an unrealistic image of the secret life of the teenager, but I can't help but laugh at some of the teen dramas I secretly (and not so secretly) love to watch - from Dawson's Creek to The O.C. and those that have now succeeded those like Gossip Girl and the recent 90210 remake, these shows are portraying 15 year old kids living the craziest lives and experiencing things that I, a 25 year old, have still yet to experience. I don't think I've led that sheltered a life, even as a somewhat conservative Christian loser, but I haven't experienced half of what these fictional kids get up to on a weekly basis. I'm not confusing fiction with reality here, I'm not even griping that kids see this stuff and think it's cool to do the bad things the characters on TV do, I'm just saying that, if shows are portraying this stuff in the hopes that teens will learn from their idol's fictitious mistakes, is it really worth it if it only relates to a tiny proportion of people? Or will the majority see it and think 'i want my life to be like this'?
Sidetracked. bored now.
Song of the Moment: Copeland - When You Never Thought You'd Stand Out |
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Glasto
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May. 7th, 2009 @ 12:27 am
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One of my favourite weekends of the year is sitting in at home and watching the Glastonbury Festival of Performing Arts on the Beeb. The experience has always, for me, rivaled actually being there in person. Of course it's probably nowhere near as good as if I were actually there, but the ability to watch all my favourite bands from the comfort of my armchair, coupled with the fact that I can flip the channel if I get bored, are a good combination for me. Plus, with the recent advances in broadcasting over the past few years, I can now watch a band on BBC2, a band on BBC Three, a band on the 'Red Button' and even more on iPlayer.
So, in preparation for the best festival of the year, and paying attention to bands who either have new material out to promote or are just long overdue their slot at Glasto, my wishlist/predictions for this year is as follows:
Headlining (these are a mixture of bands I actually EXPECT to headline, as well as bands who I think have 'paid their dues' enough and would have enough of a following to warrant headliner status)- Radiohead
- Green Day
- The Strokes
- Sigur Ros
- U2 (officially denied but still.....)
- Maximo Park
- The Cribs
And my predictions/personal picks for the rest of the festival:
The Futureheads
Friendly Fires
Phoenix
Art Brut
Jimmy Eat World
Death Cab For Cutie
The Rakes
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Mute Math
Ben Folds
Counting Crows
Vampire Weekend
Brand New
We shall see! In the meantime, enjoy this classic video which proves that the Foos aren't just tied to Reading/Leeds:
Song of the Moment: Ross Noble Youtube |
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Sorry
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May. 6th, 2009 @ 07:46 pm
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Over the past few years, this journal has basically become me posting random links to excellent things. More recently, I haven't even been phoning it in, and for that I apologise. This, however:
is too amazing not to blog.
Song of the Moment: Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Maps |
One of the most creepy videos I've ever seen on YouTube - I'm hoping it's SUPPOSED to be funny.....
Song of the Moment: RATM - Know Your Enemy |
Song of the Moment: Manic Street Preachers - Kevin Carter |
| » Fatal Error... |
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 On the control screen of the nuclear power plant in the port of Bushehr, Iran. (from UPI)
Mar. 17th, 2009 @ 08:13 pm
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| » Britney's Mic |
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See, the problem with microphones is that they convert sound waves into signal which can, in turn, be recorded...
Mar. 14th, 2009 @ 01:47 pm
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| » No Peace... |
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Every so often I enjoy a Fray Bentos pie. However, whilst cracking open the crusty 'lid' and scraping away at the doughy innards exposing hot streams of gravy and meaty gibs, I can't stop thinking about the alien autopsy from Independence Day......
Mar. 10th, 2009 @ 03:08 pm
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| » Cera = Pilgrim |
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I'm all for Cera as Scott Pilgrim but I am and will always be more for Cera as George-Michael Bluth.
There, I've said my piece.
Mar. 6th, 2009 @ 11:40 pm
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| » Watchmen |
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After months of anticipation, finally saw Watchmen today. Great film! Lots of great fighting - must have injured a LOT of stuntmen making this. Great FX, amazing cinematography. Too much weirdly inappropriate sex, even if it was in the novel, no need to see that. Same goes for John Manhattan's blue glowing CGI wang lolling around all over the place. But all in all, totally satisfied my expectations.
In an alternate universe, the Watchmen franchise could have been as widely accepted as X-Men, and then maybe this would have existed:
Mar. 6th, 2009 @ 10:10 pm
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| » Constructive Criticism. |
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I posted on the official Jimmy Eat World forums the other day, drawing attention to my band's cover of my favourite JEW song. Only two replies, both saying they thought the vocals were terrible. One guy even used the word 'hate'. I know the internet is full of people who are bullied constantly at school and so are dicks to everyone who can't sock them out online, but I was still a little disheartened by the comments, which I know is stupid because I also think that the vocals suck and need a lot of work. I think it was just the 'hate' part that got to me.
But then I watched this video:
...and laughed so hard I couldn't remember what I was sad about.
Watchmen tomorrowwwWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Mar. 5th, 2009 @ 11:35 pm
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| » KeyWall |
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I made this. Next step - stick some classic records to the wall!
Mar. 4th, 2009 @ 11:55 pm
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| » Victory Dance |
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There's no such thing as a gracious winner....
Mar. 4th, 2009 @ 10:50 pm
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| » My Google Profile |
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I made a profile on Google today, something I didn't even know existed. Seems like a great 'main site' on which you can collate your many web addresses (Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, Blogs etc....) along with contact details and other stuff.
This is mine
Why not give it a try and see what you can make? That's all for this week - see you next time on.... ART ATTACK!!!
p.s. can I say, I'm getting well into my novelty comedy music at the mo. Conchords are back, I've got the Lonely Island record on heavy rotation, and today I re-downloaded a monster archive of songs from my favourite sock puppet duo, Sifl & Olly. RONK!!
Mar. 3rd, 2009 @ 01:35 am
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| » Jimmy Eat World - Live at the Paradiso - February 2008 |
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Almost a year ago to date, I saw JEW at the Roundhouse in Camden, and it was amazing! I just found this awesome live show online. Off to watch the Killers now - Enjoy!
Feb. 28th, 2009 @ 07:06 pm
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| » Just Browsing... |
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Memory is a funny thing. Some people gauge different periods in their lives by what car they owned or where they lived...I seem to gauge mine by the web browser I use....I guess the Internet is THE invention of my generation, and so the way in which we all interact with it is a big deal to me. In the beginning, there was dial-up, and Netscape Navigator was the browser of choice, at least for me as a 10-year old. Then came a time around the age of 14 when I realised loyalty to an obviously flawed product was ludicrous when I could be enjoying the full benefits of things if only I'd swallow my 'want to be different' pride. So my Nintendo 64 became a PS2, I stopped buying Oasis records, and my browser became (shock-horror) Microsoft's Internet Explorer. And for a time it was good, but then security flaws and what seemed like an air of complacency (not to mention THOSE monopoly suits) drove me to the arms of another, Mozilla's 'Firefox'.
And so it is with a heavy heart that I must admit, as a long-time Firefox user I've become a liiiittle sick of it of late... it's noticeably sluggish at times, and while the various add-on apps are plentiful (and, for the most part, well-designed), I can't help but wonder why 'great browser feature X' is an add-on rather than an in-built feature of what is purportedly one of the best browsers out there. Google's new 'Chrome' browser seems to have a solid backbone architecture (at least that's what they say, I don't have a clue what goes on 'under the hood'), and a whole host of clever features. Plus, it looks good. But Google seem to be taking their sweet time in porting it to Mac, and so in a scenaro scarily similar to 1994's switch from Navigator to IE, I'm considering joining the masses in switching to Apple's own browser, Safari.
Apple are trialling the latest version of their successful browser in a public beta test, and in the 5 hours or so I've been using her, it's been quite an enjoyable experience. I hate iTunes, but I enjoy the iTunes-like layout of my favourite sites. I also like the noticeable spriteliness of the new Safari, both in launch time and browsing speed. However, this is of course still in beta and riddled with bugs (whilst putting those pretty pictures into this entry, the whole thing spazzed out and now I've run back to the rebound arms of Firefox - I can't help it - she's just so familiar...), but I think it shows heaps of promise, and the mere fact that I'm using Safari must mean they're doing something right....
Feb. 27th, 2009 @ 12:14 am
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| » Back in Black |
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Account name | Account number | Sort code | Balance | Available |
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| X X XXXXXXX XXXX | XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX | - | £42.89 | £1,142.89 | | XXXX XXXXX XX/XX | XXXXXXXX
| XX - XX - XX | £100.70 | £2,100.70 |
Well wouldya look at that. 5 years later and thanks in most to a nice fat promotion (and a nice loan from my kind parents), I'm FINALLY out of my overdrafts/credit card debt. And, due to being on basic rate tax for the past few years, I should also have a nice coupla grands' refund from the tax man coming to me, meaning I can pay back my parents for their £800 credit card bailout. It's all coming up Millhouse...
Feb. 26th, 2009 @ 04:08 am
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| » Kenwood Dennard |
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I found this amazing old video tonight by my personal favourite drummer of all time, Kenwood Dennard:
Hopefully you'll be able to see why he's my favourite drummer! :-)
Feb. 17th, 2009 @ 11:58 pm
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| » Please Wait... |
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Anybody else feel loading times are killing gaming?
Call me old fashioned, but I am, for the most part, an instant gratification kinda guy. And for me, nothing hits the spot faster than a spot of old fashioned gaming. No matter how long and tedius my day has been, no matter how many obstacles I've been faced with, it's good to know that I can turn to a world of video games, a wonderful alternate reality where I'm never more than minutes away from some sort of cathartic nirvana, and when I emerge hours later, drenched in zombie blood and smelling faintly of gunpowder, all the annoyance is but a distant memory.
But the games have always and will only ever be as good as their supporting technologies, the juxtoposition of hardware and software by people a zillion times more clever than me, and as games get more ambitious their loading times seem to grow. Obviously, it takes time for caches of memory to fill from other medias, be it hard drives or optical media, and these can only go so fast. Similarly, like any computerised machinery, games consoles for the most part take time to get their bearings, and so the time between you sending current shooting through their circuit boards and them carrying out a function grows exponentially. I mean, console gaming will usually, for the most part, tower over computer gaming in the 'loading times' field, as these are machines designed and optimised mainly for the purpose of running games programs. But there's still a noticeable gap there, between a gamer having the impetus to play a game and actually realising that compulsion, and as games become bigger and more developed, that gap is growing. Consoles have to deal with high definition textures, millions of floating point operations per second to calculate polygon movements, lifelike physics, high fidelity uncompressed sound. When you really get into the science behind our favourite games and the machines which make them a reality, it's utterly astounding that they actually finish loading.
Now I'm no retro fanboy; I believe that games can and do improve with time. To say that games nowadays focus more on lifelike graphics and sound over playability may be partly correct, but to categorise that as a bad thing is missing the point entirely. It's like saying that analog phonographic recordings and classic rock on vinyl is better than highly compressed and digitized pop on CD. Computer and video games, like any art, are subjective, and a lot of the time technology can be their savour. There is no golden age of gaming, and 'fun' is always in the eye (hands?) of the beholder (gamer?). Alright, developers can anti-alias and depth-of-field filter the crap out of a turd (no pun), but it's still a turd. But if you toss that turd into your tomato patch, you can grow the most delicious turd-tomatoes (turdatoes?). I should never have tried the 'shine a turd' analogy, but hopefully my point is that companies focussed on developing technologies to make games better don't always lose sight of the things that made games great in the beginning, the stories, the characters, the sometimes frustrating, often challenging but always rewarding rules of play that keep gamers coming back for more.
While I will speak out for modern games developers that have done their best to mix the classic foundations of gaming with the technological advances of today, I do see a slight issue with the costs of these advances, which brings me back to my point. Games today take 5-10 times longer to load than they did 5-10 years ago. Increased startup times of consoles, plus increased title screen emphasis, plus increased loading time at the beginning of and between most 'levels' of games has the potential to add up to a much more difficult to enjoy and ultimately less fun gaming experience. From my own personal experience, when I'm tired and lazy at the end of a long day but still feel like being stimulated (steady...) my first thought is to stick my favourite game on. But then when my mind turns to thoughts of waiting for the thing to start for the next 10 minutes rather than being immediately enthused, it becomes too taxing a task and I usually end up throwing a movie on instead. Similarly, I find it too taxing to play games where I have to display a crack-high-like alertness just to stay alive, or on screens where I have to sit at glaucoma-inducing proximities to the display to actually see where I'm being sniped from. That to me is not fun.
I first fell in love with the sort of games where you could slot in a cart, crack a clumsy power switch into position and go. Even as a kid, my 8/16-bit roots were marred by long, unskippable title screens. I can clearly remember stabbing the 'START' button in impatient frustration and thinking 'what sort of monster would make a game with title screens that had to be watched every time you switched on?' I don't know, maybe I'm just generally impatient, and that's my issue, but if I was annoyed as a child at watching that list of developers, each one with their own unskippable ident or logo, imagine how I feel now as a 24-year-old when even a game that has utilised AMAZING technologies and copied itself to an in-built console hard disk drive STILL takes 10 times longer to load than a game which preceeded it by 10 years and is STILL a better work of art?
Maybe I'm asking too much. But in today's apparently 'technologically advanced' world, I thought we would have conquered the loading hurdle to a certain extent. Embarrasingly, I think the nearest we've come is the Space Invaders minigame during the loading screen for Riiiiiiiiiiiiidge Racer... And maybe we'll never get over it. But I can only hope that as developers shift into games via broadband and load from dynamic disks or even solid state media rather than slow, unweildy, archaic optical formats, we may gain a LITTLE headway. I just can't believe that in all the gaming and game developing community nobody else is annoyed enough at this problem to do something about it. How come I can Elite Beat my way through a perfect rendition of Sk8er Boi and then simply close my DS until I'm ready to rock again, but to achieve the same on any home console would take a loading gap of about 3 minutes? What about a special 'turbo mode' for gamers who don't want to see their console's operating system every time they turn it on? I know you can set most consoles to load games directly, but why do we even need to go through the startup sequence every time when most modern computers (and that's essentially what most consoles are nowadays) can suspend their activities to RAM at the touch of a button? I don't care how many of my friends are online, I don't care what's new on Marketplace, I'm a self-centred gamer who wants to feel the cool Vice City ocean breeze blowing gently through his avatar's ebony mullet as he crusies the coast-roads on a harley; I do NOT want to wait my life away staring at a progress bar that's moving slower than an octagenarian slug trudging through a field of treacle. On diazepam. In Winter. And he's had a stroke.
Anyway, rant over. But in the unlikely event that anyone else feels the same way, I'll leave you with some faster-loading counterparts for some of my favourite games:
| NewHotness | Original Fastness | | Burnout Paradise | Excitebike | | Rez | Pilotwings | | GTA IV | Street Gangs (River City Ransom) or any Double Dragon - or even Kung Fu (NES) | | Dead Rising | Super Smash TV | | Fallout 3 | Zelda 3: Link's Awakening | | Super Smash Bros Brawl | Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 | | Left 4 Dead | Missile Command | | Shadow of the Colossus | Shadow of the Colossus (some things are just worth waiting for) | | Resident Evil 4 | Jurassic Park |
Feb. 7th, 2009 @ 04:16 pm
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| » Never let a crackhead sing at your funeral.... |
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I have been browsing YouTube tonight and happened to stumble across many hilarious videos of weird and wacky churches; kids rolling around on the floor speaking in tongues (apparently...) and gospel choirs jumping around high as a kite on 'the Holy Spirit' (or PCP...one of the two....) but this guy had be giggling like a schoolgirl:
Maybe I'm wrong to laugh at these church folk... but who's to say?!!
Jan. 28th, 2009 @ 01:21 am
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peanutismint's journal
