Writing for the internet

I feel like I have been neglecting this site a little bit of late. I feel bad about that. But, your honour, it isn’t my fault. In the past five days for example, I’ve worked 60 hours plus 10 hours commuting. That has pretty much been a constant for the last two months. I’m not complaining as I get paid by the hour and was able to buy an iPad which is fucking awesome. Unfortunately it hasn’t given me much time to write.

In addition to all this pointless toil (pointless in that I just provide shite for people to watch at home), I have started writing on the internet. I know you are thinking, ‘Hang on, but isn’t that what you are doing now? You handsome genius you.’ (Just guessing here obviously but I’m sure that’s what is going through your head.)

Well yes, but even though there are ads on this site, it is hardly making me lots of cash. See above – 60 hours TV work is what pays my bills. So I have decided to spend more time writing for sites that actually pay. One such site is Suite 101. It is a ‘content site’. There are lots of these around but Suite 101 seems fussier and you have to talk about what writing work you’ve done and submit a couple of samples. I assume that means more respect and fiscal reward but I doubt it.

Some of these content sites pay a small amount upfront. Also known as a ‘pittance’. About $15 or so. Others build on what you have written.

The amount you get for this latter type is also piss poor but the money you get grows with each piece you write. What’s more it keeps earning you money even if you stop. Unless the website goes under.

If you want to read some of the better articles on the site check out these three superb examples:

http://www.suite101.com/content/a-guide-to-pubs-in-south-end-green-hampstead-a277522

http://www.suite101.com/content/alternative-things-to-do-in-bangkok-a277101

http://www.suite101.com/content/gift-giving-in-thailand-a276529

These are coincidentally written by my own skilled hand but they are worth a look.

I’m not sure how long I will keep writing for the net. I will post an update here later. The advantage of writing for a website like Suite 101, is that your articles are readable for years and have the potential over time to make you more cash than something in print. On the minus side, I love having a portfolio of articles I have had published that I can touch and feel proud of. I know it’s vain but seeing your name and writing in a glossy mag is very satisfying. It’s even better when you open up a magazine and see your own face and bio on the writer’s page. As I said, it’s vain, but I write a blog so it shouldn’t come as a surprise.

The Word of Ward will keep going though. I like writing here. No style guides and I can swear. It’s really fucking liberating.

Kick-Ass the movie

Yes, this is a review of the film Kick-ass. Although it is, what with this being my writing, an actual ass kicker of a review.

I’d been meaning to watch this film for ages as it poses a question I have often asked myself. ‘Why aren’t there any masked superheroes?’ Surely some martial art obsessed, do-good, eccentric, nutcase would have tried it by now. You read the odd story but nothing I would describe as cool.

The film follows a geeky teen called Dave Lizewski, who tries to answer this question. He gets a green wetsuit and becomes a character known as ‘Kick-Ass’. His first time out he gets the shit kicked out him and is then run over. He keeps plugging away it at and comes to the attention of two successful but unknown masked crime-fighters. Who are hard as hell. They set out to take down a gangster and mete out some righteous justice.

One thing that surprised me in this film was just how violent it was. Which is obviously a happy discovery for someone with a cinematic bloodlust such as myself. Legs get lopped and bullets blast through heads. If you are easily offended and don’t like bad language or blood, I politely suggest you fuck off and watch some other movie. Actually it isn’t that bad at all, I just wanted to swear and use some mild alliteration.

The highlights are Nicholas Cage and his young daughter played by Cloe Moretz – who are Big Daddy and Hit Girl. There’s also good music, a hot chick, lots of humour. And fights. If that doesn’t sound good to you, then you are probably more grown up than me. Check out ‘A Single Man’.

I was genuinely surprised how much I enjoyed this film. It’s funny, violent and enjoys lots of references to geeky things like, predictably, comics.

Imagine a more fun version of Watchmen. Well worth watching.

Here’s the trailer:

This is some scary assed stuff.

The Rats are coming!

Apparently some local yokels were out ‘ratting’ when a small group of huge rats ran out. The inbred humans were basically doing what I always suspected they do in that part of the world. When they aren’t having race riots, they hang around dump-sites and shoot rats with air-guns. Nice. Just a shame the rats didn’t turn on them and mete out some karma.

Experts say it might be a breed of super rat from South America. Why are all the creepy crawlies down there so damned big? If it is a rat and not a coypu or something, then it is pretty worrying. I wrote just the other day about how we needed something genuine and cool to worry about in Blighty and now it looks like it might happen. James Herbert predicted this years ago in his superb ‘Rats’ trilogy. If, like in Domain there is also a nuclear war, we’re doomed. God I love those books.

Anyway, if it is a mega-super-giga-killa-rat from South America then lock up your cats. Check out this slightly unpleasant photo:

Unhappy cat

It’s like Tom and Jerry after Jerry has eaten some radioactive cheese.

Just imagine if the rats breed and spread to areas where the locals don’t shoot rats for fun. Where I live for example. They say you are never more than 10 feet from a rat in London but at least they wouldn’t make off with your leg.

Here’s the news, where the killjoys show it could actually be some other big rodent. Sadly quite a cute one with little hands and twitchy noses.

This is a nice enough pub and one of the few places I regularly visit in Hampstead. The others are the Hollybush (which I will review one day) and the Flask. If it’s a nice day, which is rare is this soggy country, there are a couple of pleasant tables out front for superb people watching. There’s also a smallish beer garden out back which tends to be full of smokers. The main room is slightly odd in that it is split into two areas. The bar faces the window in a D shape. Behind the D is a seating area. Both areas have a slightly different feel to them but both are pleasant.

The main draw for me are the friendly staff and the food. Plus there’s a bus from in front of my house that stops in front of the pub 5 minutes later, but that might not be the case with everyone.

We normally go there on a Monday or Tuesday. For pizza. The pub has decided to not bother with a lot of different gastropub foodstuffs. They do primarily wraps and awesome pizzas. The wraps may be awesome too but I’ve never had one. On a Monday and Tuesday they do a two for one pizza deal, so you can get one of these bad boys for £5. Which is a bargain. The £20 I always subsequently spend on beer balances things out I guess.

Even without the pizzas, if you are in the neighbourhood, it’s a nice stop off. They have great music (Hendrix, Zeppelin), good beers (try the Sagres lager), friendly staff, and a unique chandelier made out of kitchenware. Enjoy.

(There’s also a Giraffe restaurant next door that does half price cocktails from 5-7pm Sunday to Thursday as well, if you want to start early. Just FYI.)

I then predicted that there would be yet another threat this year. Rabid bubonic goat flu or something. But it hasn’t happened. I was wrong. Obviously I’ve been wrong before – I initially thought a remake of Dawn of the Dead was a pointless idea for example – but it’s rare. Rare that I’ll admit it at least.

So what went wrong? It seems the press have realised that the country just won’t stand for another tale of impending disease. You can only cry wolf a few dozen times before we wise up. Instead the media is now bleating on about how they were mislead and that most of their sources were actually in league with the drug companies. It was WHO and the drug companies that exaggerated things apparently. As stated in the always reliable Daily Mail:

“Five of the 15 specialists who sat on the emergency committee had received funding from pharmaceutical giants, or were linked to them through their research.

The revelation will prompt speculation that the ‘pandemic’ was wildly overestimated and largely fuelled by the drugs industry who stood to benefit from the panic.” (Mail, 13/08/2010)

The nasty, evil, self serving drug companies made it seem worse than it was. Thank christ for papers like the Mail for letting us know this. Cynics might argue that the media prompted the government’s panic buying of flu with articles such as:

“Swine flu deaths in UK double as country now has third highest number of cases in the world.” This Daily Mail article recounted how deaths rocketed from 7 to 14 cases and warned that: “the NHS is not ready to deal with a swine flu epidemic because of ‘muddled’ emergency plans and time-wasting bureaucracy.” (Mail, 10/07/2009)

Or this:

Ok, maybe I’m picking on the Mail a bit, it’s just that it is so much fun. All newspapers have displayed some levels of hypocrisy.

But now we have nothing to fear! We need something. Global warming might wipe out our current civilisation… but not for ages. Obviously I am only including Britain in this, there are plenty of horrendous things happening all over the world already. But we need something in Britain. Something to sell the papers, something to keep us in line. What else is there?

Legal highs – fear for your kids! Meow meow killed two and is linked, possibly, to more! Oh no, hang on, the two in question didn’t actually take any. Still, thankfully that’s been banned. Now there’s the terrifying Ivory Wave, described as being “more dangerous than meow meow” (Metro, 17/08/10). ONE guy has died. This is sad for his family but on closer inspection there’s no need to worry too much yet. Ivory Wave is actually a bath salt. The guy who died might possibly have been killed by his 300 foot fall off a cliff rather than the drug. The lesson here is not to eat household products at random as they can be poisonous or send you a bit loopy.

Double dip recession! Read any reports on this and count how many times the word “possible” occurs. We’re hardly dying in the streets. Go to a third world country and get some perspective.

Paul the psychic octopus gets death threats! Okay, this is a bit scary – I can’t believe how many idiots populate the world.

I remain unafraid. I need the media to fill me with dread, I’m getting all complacent. Something cool. Who cares if it never actually happens, the British public demands something to be terrified by or we’ll run out of conversation in the pub. Here are some suggestions:

(http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1302505/WHO-swine-flu-advisers-ties-drug-firms-Experts-linked-vaccine-producers.html#ixzz0wsOzU5g0)
(http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1198613/Swine-flu-deaths-UK-double-country-highest-number-cases-world.html#ixzz0wsQrmyHL)

(http://www.metro.co.uk/news/838251-first-briton-dies-after-taking-new-legal-drug-ivory-wave)

So what had happened? I went onto my website to check it was still the piece of unappreciated genius that I remembered and at first all seemed ok. Then I clicked on the blog section and was suddenly confronted with a huge red page that told me the site I was visiting had malware reported on it. After checking what malware was, I looked at my google analytics. It said that a particular website was known to have malware in it and the name of that site was somewhere on my site. Although it stated that there wasn’t actually any evil things on my site, the other one was a known bad boy.

What had happened was that I’d copied a picture from the aforementioned diseased site and by way of thanks I’d provided a link to them. I won’t be doing that again. I deleted the picture and the polite link and the digital doctor gave the Word of Ward the all clear. Hopefully my readership will flourish once more. I make almost £2 a month from this site and hope to get a meal or something out of it at the end of the year. Feel free to tell all your friends and colleagues about the site so that by Christmas I might be able to take my wife to somewhere nice. You know you want to.

Ironically, the picture and link that caused the red warning screen where in my post called ‘Freedom of speech’. I will henceforth stop providing links to other people’s websites and this site will remain clean and healthy. Balls to the internet community.

Set in the fictional Eastern European city of Besz it follows a policeman as he tries to work out who killed a young woman found on an estate. Having spent time in Eastern European cities, Mieville’s description of the run down city slowly emerging from the shadow of being Eastern Bloc, is spot on. Trams rattle, the internet is slow, there are lots of hookers and drinking and so on. As Inspect Borlu chases down his suspects the scope of what is going on expands and we soon realise that Nationalists, fascists, politicians and even worse may be involved.

So far, so fairly standard.

The City and The City is a book with a highly original setting, however. The clue is in the title. There is another city that Borlu visits called Ul Qoma. Ul Qoma happens to be in exactly the same place as the city Besz and has it’s own populace and fashions and phone numbers and brands of tea bag. Some parts of the city exist purely in Besz and others in Ul Qoma. Other parts are cross-hatched and citizens walk by one another or drive round each other’s traffic without acknowledging the other’s existence. They are all conditioned since birth to ‘unsee’ the other city and its denizens since birth. If they break this law and notice the buildings or populace or even worse, walk into sections that belong to the other city, they get in shit with a powerful entity/entities known as the Breach. The Breach makes people disappear or die or various other states and is a fast shadowy presence that pretty much kicks ass.

I know it sounds a bit weird but it actually works quite well and becomes almost believable. By the time that Borlu travels from Besz through the one permissable check-point to Ul Qoma and unconsciously notes that he is technically near his flat but is actually in a foreign city, you don’t bat an eyelid. Soon he becomes more involved in the Breach and the even more mysterious Orciny.

I really enjoyed this book but it didn’t quite do it for me. Apart from Borlu, all the characters seemed a bit flat. It is very well written but for reasons I can’t go into, the book didn’t quite go in the direction I wanted it to. The cities occupying the same place idea was actually pretty cool and well explained – to a point. I then found myself with a few questions that hadn’t been satisfactorily answered and I don’t think it was because Mieville was being purposefully enigmatic. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book but on reflection wanted something slightly different.

The City and The City has won numerous awards though, so it obviously completely satisfied some. It is good, atmospheric, clever, Kafka-esque, and so forth, but didn’t quite tick all my boxes. Maybe it will yours – there isn’t much out there like this, so you should give it a try.

i-Dosing is allegedly the new craze sweeping the easily swept youth of today. It works on a principal that uses ‘binaural beats’ where opposite ears hear differing sound waves. If I was to be cynical, I would call this fascinating aural phenomenon something whackier like ’stereo’.

But apparently i-Dosing can get you off your tits with the effects replicating a variety of drugs. You can get stoned or coked-up but all legally and without coughing or numb gums. Essentially the audio waves put you into a trance state. This theory has apparently been used in clinical settings to research things like sleep disorders and has been around since its discovery in 1839 by German physicist Heinrich Wilhelm Dove.

To add even more credence to i-Dosing’s ability to ‘fuck you up’, it has already been the subject of some panicked warnings by the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. Maybe they are over-reacting a tad. I suspect no-one who’s panicking has based their fears on anything as daft as actual fact or evidence.

There are numerous i-Dose tracks available through the genius of the non-judgemental internet. In the name of science I thought I’d try out a couple that are on youtube. So you don’t have to. Nice of me isn’t? Putting my brain on the line for a website. I remember an awesome bit in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash when a guy in a virtual world (like Second Life) gets a scroll and when he reads it, it scrambles his brain and puts him in a coma. This could have happened to me.

In the name of science and journalism I have previously ‘experimented’ with weed and cocaine. The weed was in Amsterdam where it is decriminalised and therefore morally ok. The coke was at a party – I work in TV and it’s practically compulsory. If a policeman reads this then I should point out that I’m lying and you can’t prove nothing copper.

So what happened?

I can reveal that i-Dosing does fuck all. No drug induced state, no euphoria, nothing. I did experience intense moments of boredom and irritation though. I’m not sure what clinics have used this technique but I suspect they also use aromatherapy and healing crystals. This is clearly a lot of quite clever kids having a laugh at the establishment. It reminds me of when Chris Morris invented the drug ‘cake’ and persuaded celebrities and politicians to jump on the band-wagon. Morris even got them to say that ‘This is a made up drug’ that affects the part of the brain called ‘Shatner’s Bassoon’. I’ve said it hundreds of times on this site – the press loves a good scare story and won’t let contrary evidence or pesky facts get in the way of selling their product. Here’s the dozy media terrifying parents over nothing:

In case you don’t believe me I have included an i-Dose clip. I will not be held responsible if you have a good time or get a headache though. If, like with weed, it leads inevitably to you using crack, then it’s because you are an idiot not the ‘binaural beats’. I suspect this whole craze is made up and is some kind of viral hoax to be spread around the internet by drug addled writers like myself. If it doesn’t work, and it won’t because it’s someone having a laugh at the press, I can recommend Thai stick and Pink Floyd. Enjoy!

The Faroe Islands

I saw a documentary the other day called ‘The Cove’. It was a pretty awesome documentary about a secret bay where a load of Japanese slaughter thousands of dolphins for no real valid reason. At the start of the documentary, before you see the slaughter, the activists involved are a bit baffled as to why. Dolphin meat has toxic levels of mercury and don’t make good eating. They then discovered that the fisherman were passing off some dolphin meat as whale meat and people were unwittingly poisoning themselves. My first thought was that it sucks for the dolphins but at least they aren’t endangered like whales – if people ate what they thought was whale but were in fact ingesting toxic dolphin meat, then at least some good is coming out of all this. Lots of dead whale munchers. Then it turns out that kids were being fed this meat too and that’s just wrong. They should at least have the chance to grow up and make their own choices.

As you can see from the photo here though, the Japanese are not alone. Norweigans, Icelanders, and the Faroe Islanders kills whales.They justify it because these long finned pilot whales are on the slight increase and so therefore it’s ok to hack at them with choppers.

One of the reasons given by the Japanese in the documentary for killing whales and dolphins are that the animals in questions eat too much fish and

No more fish

stocks of fish are depleting. This is ridiculous. Numerous studies have shown that fish stocks are depleting because, and this seems fairly obvious, we are all eating too much fish. When you hunt a marine species to the point that less than 10% of its population survives, that species goes into collapse. It has been proven that if diversity drops, then so do fish yields. In about 40 years we may just run out. According to UN studies fish exports rose 55% from 2000 to 2006. Six of the top ten exporters were Western countries (http://www.fao.org/newsroom/common/ecg/1000850/en/fishtradefacts08b.pdf). Killing dolphins and whales won’t help fish recover, not eating them will.

Another argument put forward by all whaling countries, is that it is a way of life. Well, tough shit. Do something else. Unless you’re an idiot you can retrain. Plenty of jobs have gone – chimney sweeps, hansom cab drivers, coal miners, dodo handlers, British Airways staff (soon). Welcome to the modern world. Become a web designer or something. Thanks to the EU nearly all British fisherman have had to do this.

I’ve had friends that claim to be vegetarians but then it turns out they eat fish. It’s weird being lectured by someone with a plate of 30 dead whitebait in front of them that my eating a slice of cow is wrong. Also when people say they eat fish, they actually mean fish, crustaceans, molluscs, arthropods and so on. Basically they seem to hate eating anything that made the evolutionary crawl out of the sea. It’s ok for one person to eat 50 mussels but not 50 people to eat one cow. At least now you can point out that they are causing the death of huge amounts of species and the imminent collapse of marine ecologies, while you are eating an easily sustainable food-source or ’sausage’. (Apologies to these friends as you no longer do this.)

So what should you eat? Obviously something has to die as we live on organic matter. You can eat vegetables and fruit. Woohoo!

I personally think it’s ok to eat cows, pigs, lambs, chickens, insects and swans. The first four can be humanely farmed and can happily trot round fields before you fire a bolt into their brains. Insects are in no danger of dying out and are pretty much the same as prawns. Bit weird though I’ll admit but huge amounts of the planet eat them. I ate a fried grasshopper in Thailand once and it was actually quite tasty although when I woke up with a hangover and found a leg stuck in my tooth, I almost threw up. Swans are ok to eat because they are pure evil. I hate swans.

Basically you should eat your greens and if you choose to eat meat, eat one that is easily sustainable. Preferably one that would die out pretty quickly if we stopped looked after them, like with cows.  I do think that the animals should be organic and free range though. Battery farming is cruel. This will also mean that meat will be more expensive, taste better, and will become more of treat. People shouldn’t expect a chicken for a fiver or meat with every meal.

So please my friends, don’t eat so much fish, campaign against whalers, stop the slaughter of dolphins. Also avoid tofu, it’s just weird.

Sources and pictures:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6108414.stm

United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization http://www.fao.org/newsroom/common/ecg/1000850/en/fishtradefacts08b.pdf

http://www.laughparty.com/funnypicture/Eat-More-Chicken/300/

barcelonareview.com

I am an atheist and have nothing against those of you who wish to believe in all powerful magic being. Do what you want. The thing is, I am having to pay for this visit. The current amount is apparently £15 million quid. Christ knows why. That figure doesn’t even include security, so presumably it’s all going on bread, wine, incense, and gold trimmed pillows or something.

Why should I pay for some representative of a religion I’m not part of? Are people of other religions even more annoyed than me? Officially I’m a Jedi, so why doesn’t the government pay for a huge Star Wars convention for us? Fly in all the stars so we can shake hands with Yoda and get to know the guy when he’s not on screen. Catholics make up 8% of England’s population whereas Jedis make 1% so £2 million should be fair. As it stands, you have to pay to go to geeky conventions, why can’t this be the case with the Pope? Didn’t Henry VIII say “balls!” to the Catholic church and had us separated from the whole religious sycophancy? Why then are we paying for the head of a group we split with?

People bitch about the monarchy all the time but they live here and are our monarchy. They bring in tourism and help pay for themselves and do good things for charity. Besides I like having a Queen and don’t want to be a republic for the simple reason that it just isn’t as cool. The monarchy costs us a chocolate bar a year. Which is worth it in my opinion.

Ok, I’ll stop complaining. Don’t want a load of angry Catholics on my case.  They breed quite quick, so there can be a lot of them. Thankfully they have to be merciful and forgiving or they go to hell, so I should be ok. Apparently they’re already starting to queue up in places like Glasgow so hopefully they won’t read this. Even if they do – I’m chipping in for their benefit not mine, so chill out.

I would just like to have been asked if I wanted a snickers bar or a pope. I love snickers.

In case you aren’t familiar with the Total Perspective Vortex, it appears in what must surely be one of the greatest series of books / greatest radio plays of all time – The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

The story is this:

A man called Trin Tragula gets pissed off with his wife always saying that he has no sense of perspective. So he builds the Total Perspective Vortex just to shut her up. Essentially, it is a device that shows you a virtual recreation of the entire universe, everything in all its glory and hugeness. Then it has a tiny arrow saying ‘You are here’. Trin Tragula’s wife goes inside and when she realises how utterly and completely insignificant she is, she goes mad. It then gets used as a torture device for shredding people’s minds. The only person who has ever survived this device is Zaphod Beeblebrox, who said that it just confirmed what he has always thought, “I’m a really great guy.”

Well the following video is a bit like that. Someone gave me a link to this, but unless my ego is so huge that I’m immune, it won’t send you mad. It will just make you feel very small. When it comes out in 3D or virtual reality, then be afraid.

Now go back to your pointless job and do some work.

This is Michael Chrichton’s last ever book. Which is incredibly sad because he was a great author. Not one to settle on any genre, he has tackled dinosaur parks, the medical world, the aeroplane industry, the environment, vikings, pirates, and more. He is consistently fun to read. This book was found on his laptop after he died, which always makes me a bit wary. Was it finished properly? Why didn’t he send it out?

Pirate Latitudes is about pirates. Of the Caribbean. Had to word that carefully. It follows the adventures of the privateer Captain Charles Hunter as he has a series of what can only be described as ‘rip-roaring’ adventures. The core of the novel is his attack on a fortress called Matanceros in order to nick a Spanish treasure galleon moored under its protection. The fortress is predictably impregnable. Almost.

The book reads like a fun, shallow series of adventures. Every pirate adventure cliche is present, it is almost as if he wrote a list. Rough rogue Captain leads a plucky crew and does the following (tick the pirate story boxes): climbs cliffs, blows up strongholds, has duels, sleeps with whores, has sea battles, gets thrown in a dungeon, fights cannibals, is attacked by a kraken, and lots more. I didn’t give away any more of the plot than is on the cover. Plus it doesn’t matter. Think of this book as an old fashioned periodical adventure series, like Flash Gordon or the basis behind Indiana Jones. If you approach in that frame of mind you won’t be disappointed.

With the above mindset, you can forgive the cliches. And it is very cliched and formulaic. His crew, especially when he recruits them, is like those you would find in a cheesy film. The ones where a leader goes through a load of dossiers and finds one that can fly a helicopter and is good at knife-fighting, another that is a brilliant hacker, and so on. In this: the Jew, aka, Black Eye, is brilliant with explosives. Enders is a brilliant surgeon and one of the best helmsman around. Lazue is a feisty woman fighter who has brilliant eyesight. Bassa ‘The Moor’ is a huge strong black guy with no tongue. All a bit familiar but it really doesn’t matter in a story like this. Look at the Nazi in Raiders of the Lost Arc, or Brian Blessed in Flash Gordon, or anyone in a Bond film.

So is Pirate Latitudes any good? Yes. Not brilliant, but fun. It’s an action adventure about pirates for fuck’s sake, what were you expecting? It is harmless escapism, with lots of narrow escapes and cliffhangers. It is a bit cliched (a word I have used a lot in this review) but that is utterly irrelevant as the book is well-written in a page-turning thriller kind of way. If you want more realistic sea adventures – look at the superb Patrick O’Brian. If you want a rip-roaring pirate tale in the vein of Treasure Island, look no further. Me hearties.

Except the World Cup. I like world cups – be they football or rugby or cricket or women’s beach volleyball. They are exciting and rare and there has to be an outcome.

I even feel part of the footie humour. Although the main joke going around is based on history and I am very passionate about history. I first heard this two days ago, which by internet standards makes it incredibly old. First I heard it on text, then twitter, then facebook, then email, and blah blah.

“The World Cup is turning out to be like World War Two. The French are out early, the Americans have turned up at the last minute, and we’re left to fight the Germans.” Hilarious isn’t it? Actually I thought it was mildly amusing the first time.

You have to feel sorry for the French. Well, not really but you can pretend. I could empathise when Captain Thierry Henry was summoned before President Sarkozy to explain why things went so badly. I had to do that at school all the time. Except the whole country didn’t know about it. It was probably blamed on the company he keeps in Gillette commercials – that Tiger Woods is always shagging around (allegedly) and even the usually flawless Federer had a match point against him at Wimbledon. The three of them clearly need separating. It is all a bit weird though.

Anyway. Football. Us versus the Germans. I always predict we’ll limp through the early rounds then get knocked out by Germany on penalties. I’m hoping that by writing this down, that won’t happen. Let’s see. If it works then this website will be little more than a list of predictions, none of which I really want to come true. (I predict Jessica Alba will be fully clothed on TV this year, sort of thing.)

I may be wrong about fans having an influence on the outcome of football. I say that as a cunning link to a load of gratuitous pictures I found enjoyable 4 years ago on the topic of why England didn’t win the World Cup in 2006. Sorry if it is a bit misogynous but we’re discussing sport yeah?

AND NOW THE VISUAL PUNCHLINE

Well, that’s me done talking about football for a while. I’ll write another post on it in four years. By then, I’ll probably have minions, but I promise one of the better ones will write it.

Thanks to http://treebeard31.wordpress.com for the pictures.

I work in TV and right now it is all about 3D. The new transmission suites I have seen have surround sound – something like 15.1 (15 speakers) it’s like being in an amphitheatre – and they have 3D. With the specs. When people in suits come to have a look it’s like a Roy Orbison convention.

At E3 the future all seems to be about leaping around your living room like an eager pillock having a happy spasm. This is all thanks to motion sensor stuff. Like with the Wii. Which is crap in my opinion. Sure it can be fun, for a bit, if you aren’t really appreciative of what modern games can be like. Games are evolving to the point where it is like an interactive movie with genuine characterization and plot twists. They are really coming to the fore as an alternative entertainment to sitting on your arse watching TV shows. The problem with all this motion stuff is that the games are rarely any good for more than 15 minutes and are purely on the market to meet the desires of families. Virtual tennis, virtual bowling, virtual baseball. These are all things you can quite easily do for real and are more fun in real life. I saw a game where you are throwing a virtual frisbee for fuck’s sake. If these aren’t banal enough, you get get some utterly lame attachments. Like a virtual knife that doesn’t actually cut food while you virtually cook.

This is fun apparently. Why not actually cook?

You rarely get to shoot a zombie in the head in real life, or drive a Ferrari through a crowded city at 150mph, or land on an alien planet, or whatever. This is what games should be! Escapist fun.

On the plus side, malcoordinated fools are having funny injuries thanks to the Wii:

Wii injuries

This is a trend that is set to continue. Playstation are bringing out the Playstation move, which looks a bit like a dildo blowing a bubble.

The big buzz at the moment is the new Xbox Kinect. The name is presumably a mix of connect and kinetic. Wow… clever. It looks pretty cool and maps your entire body in the way you see in movie effects when they make an actor dress in a bodysuit covered in ping-pong balls in front of a blue/green screen. This could make for some pretty great fighting games but I still suspect they’ll be pretty shit. Most games will be running or pointing or something.

A few years ago I had the Playstation Eye. It was similar to the kinetic in that it mapped your body. You could pop virtual balloons and crap like that. Fun for a short while but then you want to sit back on the couch and kill hordes of enemies or creep terrified through a haunted space station, the way God intended.

This new technology, coupled with 3D, might be a bit more fun. I still remain doubtful however. It will obviously get better and better as the technology progresses but right now its in it’s gawky nerd teenage phase. Literally, when you see people in the unfashionable glasses flailing around with no semblance of coordination. When it becomes more advanced with groin attachments or improved 3D with no glasses, we’ll be rapidly approaching adulthood.

Then my friends, it will be holo-suites or a brain attachment that makes the experience indistinguishable from real life. That will be the future of games. This might turn gamers who don’t have much of a life into gamers with no real life at all. I suspect they won’t care.