The David Cameron Nightmare Seed.

Hello, people.  How are you today?  Good?  Filled with nonsense and joie de vivre?  Want to have that stripped away from you in the most brutal way possible?  Of course you do.

Look at this face:

Really look at it, ignoring its graininess^*.  Many of you know this smug, horrible avatar of greedy privilege.  Some call him reptilian, but I think that gives reptiles grounds to sue.  See those shark-like dot eyes, black with caustic ideology.  I bet you can hear his voice, spouting shit so corrosive it's easy to believe his heart doesn't pump blood, but pure bile^**.

Now imagine that face, hovering over you, flushed red^† with sweat.  Perspiration forming rivulets and running down his nose to drip into your eye.  Hair plastered to his head.  His arms shake with the effort of keeping him above you.  He grins at you in post-coital goofiness and withdraws his rapidly diminishing erection, wiping it on your thighs as he does.

He flops down onto his side with a long, drawn-out sigh.  He reaches across to his discarded trousers, fishes in the pockets, pulls out his wallet and peels off few notes.  These notes he carefully shoves into your mouth until you gag, his post-coital smile still in place, never.  As you are about to vomit he lets go and punches you in the face.

Not pretty.

Now, if you're Scottish, think about that.  Think about any future Prime Minister of any party, sitting in Westminster, erection and fists at the ready.  I could say so much more, but I'll leave that there for you to think about.

^* Maybe I should have black-and-whited it.

^** Or you're a Tory and think he's a capitalist hero, in which case I am sorry for your illness.

^† Redder, if you want to be entirely accurate.  I'm always going for accuracy.  Except for when I can't be arsed.


Will

The Quiet's Worrying.

Last week was my fiftieth blog post.  Don't all stand up in ovation at once, it's taken me almost six years to rack those up, often after long lulls.  But very few lulz, I'm sure some of you are sniggering to yourselves, buncha shitty bastards.

Being internet quiet bothers me a little, because it makes me think I'm not doing anything.  Actually it usually coincides with a time when I'm not doing very much creatively.  That's an odd thing to notice, I know, but it fills me with the worries.  Oh so many worries.

What if I stop writing blog posts and my creativity drops off?  Ah, fuck!  The torture that is!  It means I'll have to keep the motor running on this, and most of the time I find it hard to think of something to write about.  So you end up looking at this self-reflective babble.  Can't be fun for you.  Poor unfortunate internet wretches – but you're all still bastards.

Don't worry, it's not all going to be close-up pictures of my belly button fluff right at the source, though that's now tempting^*.

What I'm going to do this week, and probably other weeks in the future is just magpie shit.  Plonk stuff here as the week goes on until it resembles some kind of post and publish it once on my Wednesday schedule.  A nice theory, and we'll see how it works out.

I'll mention things like that utter nonsense from the Brit Awards^**.  David Bowie, upon winning something or other, sent forth the Spidery Coke Monster – AKA Kate Moss – to deliver an acceptance speech.  I don't know most of what was said, as I have no interest, but it seems it was signed off with "Scotland, stay with us."

What the thundering fuck?  Stay with who?  Ex-pat English musicians?  I mean, seriously, man, a bit of clarity won't go amiss here.  But what does it matter to him whether Scotland remains part of the UK?  I suppose we can be thankful he said please.  And just so you know I think Sean Connery's a bit of a cunt by shouting for independence, but showing no inclination to living in the country.  Can you tell what side of the argument I'm on?  I might actually do a blog about it in the future.

Ideas!  I knew there was a good reason to do this!

My wife and I went to the Jack Vettriano retrospective at Kelvingrove the other week.  Interesting exhibit, as it starkly shows up the artist's weaknesses.  The man has serious trouble with faces, like, off-puttingly so.  It was packed, though, to the point where it was hard to get close enough to see some of the paintings.  That was a week before the exhibition ended.  We went to Kelvingrove again this Saturday to buy a poster from the shop and holy fucking shit!  I'm glad we'd already gone to the exhibition.  Some of the poor buggers in the queue were told they might have to wait up to an hour to get in.  An hour!  You can't help wonder how much money's been made on this^†.

It's also been pointed out that it's over a year since the Playstation 4 was announced.  That went fast.  Mind you last year went fast leading up to the release of the console.  I may have some words on this too.  Brainstorming, that's the fucking ticket.

And more fucking swearing.  Can't have too much.

^* No, no, no!  Don't want to become a blog that comes up in one of those kinds of searches.

^** That I, funnily enough, didn't watch.  Fucking commercial music wank-material.

^† Turns out a fucking frightening amount, most likely.


Will

It's Not A Confession If I Don't Give A Shit.

Yep, so I liked Two and A Half Men.  It's a weirdly derided and reviled television show, getting a shitload of flak from various quarters.  I'm not entirely sure why, other than the catch-all of people are fucking weird.  I'm also not entirely sure how it got to be so popular, either, but the vitriol it gets seems...disproportionate.  It's an entertaining bit of sitcom fluff by and large – you watch it once and then pretty much forget about it once the end credits have rolled.  Kind of like you wish you could forget about that body in the garden, the one that keeps whispering about the monkeys.

No doubt I'll get a bit of stick for admitting I enjoy (or rather enjoyed) a show that's considered trash and a perfect target for ridicule.  Fair enough.  In a lot of ways I should have been part of the crowd catcalling the programme and decrying it as shit from the start.  It's not as if I'm above that kind of thing, there are quite a few things I find myself getting on the bandwagon of disliking^*, but I couldn't see what all the fuss was about.

In the last couple of series it's started to lose its enjoyment factor.  It managed a half decent season after Charlie Sheen went off the deep end and started ranting about tiger blood and whatever else squirmed into his head through the coke-fuelled haze.  Then it lost its way, and the fact there wasn't a 'half' man anymore became this great foghorn, blaring, "We have no idea what the fuck is going on!  Keep watching anyway!" I can't help feeling they took their cue from ole Carlos Estevez.

What kept me watching when I first stumbled on the early episodes shown on Channel Five back in, like, the misty times of 2005 was that it was a little different from your average sitcom.  It still had all those sitcom tropes: the canned laughter, the aggressive grip on the status quo and the growing implausibility of the premise.  I mean it's the same with most sitcoms, the whole situation gets harder to maintain the longer they go on, like a frustrated erection.  And Two and A Half Men is onto its eleventh series; it's starting to go a bit floppy.  Friends only ran for ten series and by the last three it became a smear of unpleasant, mawkish shit^**.

Mawkish has never been an accusation that could be levelled at Two and A Half Men.  Yes it did go down the sentimental route on occasion and that was cool, it kept the characters feeling human – or as human as sitcom characters ever get.  It needed a core of humanity because it had a gleeful air of cynicism, capering like a sadistic, sarcastic elf, giggling while it tells that guy with the broken back it feels so bad for him.  Perhaps it was this that bothered so many people – the show wasn't about fluffy bullshit, it was about this narcissistic, partying, virtually sociopathic arsehole having his life invaded by his needy, slightly parasitic brother.  There aren't a lot of warm fuzzies in that set up.

The cynicism continued in the portrayal of Jake, the kid in the show.  He wasn't one of those smart arse moppets nor was he wise for his years and he certainly wasn't the hellion Bart Simpson was.  He was a dumb, ordinary, kid and he mostly said and did dumb things, like real human beings of any age.  Just like human beings of any age he would rarely say anything that was profound or smart, but on the one or two occasions he managed insightfulness it fleshed him out, made him feel a bit more real.  The episodes where he was oblivious to all the adults' shenanigans were funny, though, and reminded me of myself sometimes..

Then there was Alan, played by Jon Cryer, who, before that was most famous for playing Duckie in Pretty In Pink.  In the beginning of the show he was a sensitive loser, who managed to make all the wrong decisions.  Most of these decisions had a habit of leaving him destitute.  As the series went on it became clear he was shaped by the way he was treated by his mother and older brother growing up.  Then Alan started veering into the land of the caricature.  Out went the sensitivity and in came the amoral leech, changing him from a likeable, sympathetic character into one that makes you want to turn the TV off every time he's on screen.

This is where things get weird and it highlights the problem with US networks' obsessions with syndication – the magic twenty-two episode season.  Long running US programmes start to creak very quickly because each series runs for so long.  Stories get boring and repetitive, and you can almost see the whisky stains of burnt-out writers on the screen.  It all gets stale and the networks obsess over it.  This is where the greatest paradox comes in: change fucks everything up.

And not in a good way.

Fine, the production landed on its feet by creating a likeable, if a little boring new lead, Waldon, played by Ashton Kutcher^†,.  The changes made to Alan's character started to put a strain on the narrative abilities of the writers and the production as a whole.  Then, in series eleven a new character was introduced: Charlie's niece, Jenny.  Clearly supposed to be a substitute for Charlie Sheen's character.  Jenny is a boozing, promiscuous narcissist, just like the Charlie^‡ character; and, for some reason Waldon allows her to stay in his home^§.  There are three things wrong with this character: she's unpleasant, she's fucking boring and she doesn't fit.  The producers should maybe have gambled on bringing a completely different character into the mix, maybe something that didn't make the, admittedly already shaky, internal logic of the show screech in unholy agony.

Since this character's arrival the stories have become unfunny messes.  The programme meanders along trying to squeeze laughs out of us with increasing crassness and tastelessness.  I've got nothing against crass tastelessness – I can get a giggle out of a good fart joke^§§.  A good fart joke.  They haven't managed one of those in a fucking age.

But that was just a slow rot.  What almost made me unplug the TV in rage and has properly put me off the whole show is Blurred Lines.  That fucking song I heard about, but managed to avoid for most of last year.  I avoided, at least, until I watched the generally trashy and sometimes amusing year-in-review type programmes over Christmas and they all fucking played this piece of shit.  Everything about it, from the tone, the music to the lyrics just make anyone who likes it look like a cunt.  Then they used it on Two and A Half Men.  And I'm done.  I'll muddle through to the end of the series and then it's getting wiped from the TiVo, because there are some lines that shouldn't be crossed, blurry or not.

^* Finding my own way, you understand.  I'm not some mindless sheep who follows things non-critically, I've told you this before.  I can do independent intolerance.

^** And then the final episode turned into this out-and-out nasty piece of fan service bullshit with queasy shades of misogyny just to get the skin really crawling.  That's why any of us watch sitcoms, isn't it?  To have our skin set to crawling.  Right?  RIGHT?

^† Another unduly vilified figure as far as I can see.  Fuck, I thought I could be intolerant.  He's fucking Mila Kunis, yes we get it, move on.

^‡ Charlie Sheen can't handle a character that doesn't share his stage name, it seems.  He's been Charlie in Spin City and now again in Anger Management.  There are probably more examples, but I just can't be bothered finding them.  It's probably all the drugs he's done have turned his memory to mush.  I have no real excuse for not researching this further.

^§ The show already constantly jabs at the ridiculousness of him allowing Alan to stay, so they aren't unaware of the oddness.

^§§ And that's just the tip of the tasteless iceberg.  I'm actually quite hard to offend.



Will

The Modding World

I’m no fancy coder. In fact I’m no kind of coder at all. I can fiddle about a bit with very basic HTML, but otherwise I’m completely clueless when it comes to making things happen with computer code. I tried to learn a bit as a kid, but it turned into a dizzying swirl of things that didn’t make a whole lot of sense and the can-can music started playing in my head. This is BASIC we’re talking about here, the same language we were forced to use in computer studies, so you can imagine the miserable, though musical, time I had of that particular class. As much as I tried, I couldn’t work out how to get the damn thing to work – and I so wanted to know how it worked. This was the first suspicion I got that I’m a bit on the dumb side.

Still, even now, as a sophisticated^* – but still dumb-ish – adult, there’s something fascinating to me about the whole coding side of gaming. It fills me with wonder that they can put together strings of gibberish which coalesce in the characters and worlds floating around on your screen – often trying to kill you. It’s something I’ve always found sort of arcane. I just can’t get my brain around the whole business at all; to the point where I’m almost Rain Man-style punching myself in the head. Nyaaaaaaaa!

Even more fascinating to me are those folk who crack open games and fiddle about with their innards, like mad Roswell autopsy doctors, rearranging and replacing the quivering innards of the game to come up with something different. Not always better, mind you, just different. I’m fascinated by this world, mainly because I don’t have access to it. I just hear things about it on the internet wind, whispered by those in the know or all-capsed by crazies who insist it’s all just the Illuminati desperate for new thong underwear^**.

Modding isn’t a new phenomenon (and neither are crazies blurting about why their underwear disappears into their rectums) the early days of home micros had plenty of modding. To be honest if it weren’t for modders, if what I’m led to believe is correct (I refer you to my statement about dumbness above), a lot of games on the Spectrum and the Commodore 64 wouldn’t exist. There were also those who came up with ‘pokes’, the quaint term (and, let’s not kid ourselves, hilariously dirty) for creating strings of code that by-passed the games’ functions to make them easier – you know, a cheat: infinite lives, infinite time, invulnerability or infinite ammo. They were great, when they worked. About ninety-five percent of the time you sat through the loading of your prospective game only to discover the pokes mangled a bit too much and it crashed or, even more infuriating, the game loaded fine, just as if it was running normally, which you soon realised it was. Someone, somewhere was cackling ‘Suckers’ to themselves. Oh, yes, I know their game. Bastards.

Whether the game worked or not, wasn’t the point, the fact was there were industrious folks out there breaking open the code of games, prodding around inside and making changes. Now you have guys prising up the hood of a game engine and tweaking it in different ways. They’re adding their own signature to the game, and going to great lengths to do so.

There are even those who improve games. Our old, buggy friends Bethesda have benefited greatly from those industrious little modders. These guys have swooped in and covered over the cracks in games like Fallout 3 and the Elder Scrolls games after the company has left the games alone.

How great would it be to have that kind of resource on the consoles? And by that I mean the PS3, of course. If I had an XBox 360^† I’d talk a lot about that too, but I don’t, so I won’t. We’ve kinda been left with still-broken forms of the above-mentioned games. Imagine if Sony allowed players to get in and faf around with the code of certain games? What wonders we could behold! A game of Fallout: New Vegas that doesn’t have a fucking seizure when you go to too many settlements. How great would that be?

Of course there would be the other side of the equation: nasty little creeps messing with the code and creating malware. As it is we already occasionally get that with the PS3, like the evening I was playing Modern Warfare 2 online and suddenly the game seemed to decide that psilocybin mushrooms would be good in an omelette. No harm was done to the system, but it did kind of break my game when I was getting millions of XP for kills. I couldn’t really look at Modern Warfare 2 in the eye again after that, like I’d seen it get into a car for money.

We’re never going to see the wonder of modded games (outside of the very limited ways some games will allow) on the PS3, but a man can speculate on the world that could be.

^* Okay, I can’t help but laugh at that either. Me, sophisticated, the very idea.

^** Fine, it's hyperbole for comic effect, so sue me.

^† Or them thar new-fangled PS4s and XBox Ones.


Will

Scraping All Those Pennies.

Okay, I'm going to give some people a little length of rope to hang me here: I don't have a huge insight into how big businesses work.  The internal workings of large companies are somewhat arcane and nausea-inducing.  I always envision people in suits getting promotions based only marginally on their abilities and mostly based on how much arse they're willing to have near their mouths.  A skewed, paranoid picture, possibly, but it's hard to shake it^*, especially when you read about the kind of shit that goes on.

Anyway.  Since I have no real understanding of businesses of a certain bigness, I will only talk about it in the vaguest of terms, in a hushed voice, hoping they don't swoop out of the darkness^**, plucking me away and setting me to work in their customer service department.  Eeeep.  That image is bowel-worrying.  I'm sure I can extrapolate things, we can all do that, but usually when I try to my wonky understanding of human nature screws up my prediction and I end up looking like I'm somewhere advanced on the autistic spectrum.  I'll give it the ole college try, though.

What I can understand is greed.  We all know greed and we all see it.  Just a quick glimpse at British Telecom, British Gas and British train fares^† tells you what you need to know about greed.  It's not those companies I'm looking at right now, though they deserve all the fucking lambasting they get.

I've been reading about corporate greed in different areas in the last week, in areas slightly less consequential than transport, communication and power.  They might not impact lives quite as much, but it doesn't make their money-grubbing antics any less unappetising.  Like watching a demented and unreformed Ebenezer Scrooge bashing orphans on the head and carrying them off to workhouses, cackling all the way.

So, I present to you the curious cases of Games Workshop and EA Games.

Yes, note the word connecting both.  I'll give you a moment to consider sticking around before clicking on something else, perhaps some hollow 'inspiring' quotation perhaps.  To the two people who have stuck around: what the fuck is wrong with you?

Since you've stayed I'll offer some background.  Games Workshop is the company behind the tabletop battle games Warhammer Fantasy Battle (or simply Warhammer) and Warhammer 40,000 (known also as Warhammer 40K or 40K).  Both of these games involve the use of miniatures^‡ to simulate battles in either an epic fantasy setting or a far-flung future – guess which is which.  Games Workshop has been the undisputed giant of this market for a couple of decades.  EA Games, full Sunday title being Electronic Arts, is a computer games publisher and current Source of All Evil^§.

I used to love playing Warhammer 40K.  In my teens and early twenties I bought lots of miniatures and rules books.  I wasn't spectacular at the games, but I generally had fun playing.  Not long after I started in the hobby, I got one of my patented foreshadowing moments (see my Dean Koontz open letter for details, I'll still be here when you're done^§§), but couldn't quite explain it.  Something was off about it.  Unlike my Koontz foreshadowing the problem became clear to me fairly quickly: expense.  The models to play this game, we have to use and only from Games Workshop, were pricey.  Not break the bank pricey, but you had to think long and hard about when and which purchases you were going to make.  This was the early nineties, when Games Workshop still sold miniatures other than their own Citadel Miniatures, but that didn't last, oh no.  Soon it was only Citadel Miniatures as the official miniature for their games.  And prices started to go up.

Now, you have to pay almost fifty quid for a sixty or seventy millimetre model – and not even a metal model, at that, because Citadel don't do metal no more.  It's all plastic these days, guv.  That's a ridiculous amount of money and it's only for a single miniature; for even a small game of 40K you need at least twenty-five or thirty models.  And even your bog standard troop type models are not cheap, costing twenty-five quid for ten plastic models.  That's insanity.  And there are people more passionate than me about the whole business who'll also point out the overpriced and constantly re-released rules books (with new rules^§§§!! And new units!!) that are broken anyway.  And don't get anyone started on the prices of paints.  Whoo!  That's a big can of worms, there.

I stepped away from the hobby quite a long time ago, but I still look in on it once in a while and was amused and saddened when I read recently their share price had plummeted.  It seems Games Workshop's policy of extreme pricing because there was no alternative to their model or system has come back and bit them on the arse.  There are other games systems around now that don't demand such huge sums of money from those who indulge in the hobby.  You have to feel sorry for the staff though, because at some point it's going to come back and bite them too.

An interesting thing about the Games Workshop thing is that it got me back to something I've done periodically: making rules for my own games.  Most of the time these rules were messy and ultimately didn't work.  This time probably won't be much different, but I'm going to see what I make of it^§§§§.

Now, to the other greedy bastard company: EA.  They have come under fire in the last couple of weeks for re-releasing a game I loved.  They resurrected Dungeon Keeper.  It doesn't really matter what the game was like, because, by all accounts^§§§§§ this update for the mobile market bears not a fucking ounce of resemblance.  For a start, they've stripped it down to being a tower defence game, right, fair enough, it's for mobile, it's just for people on the train or bus going to and from work.  The real heinous crime comes in the pay to play model they've crammed into it.

For this game, in order to do anything that even sniffs of gameplay without waiting for hours or days waiting for a simple action to occur requires money, you know to make up for the game being free to download.  And it's on a sliding scale, depending on how advanced the action is you want to do.  Some of the reviews I looked at reported requiring hundreds of dollars to achieve anything in the game.  Do you remember my crack here about Sticky the Stick?  Did someone at EA see this and go, "Fuck me!  This nobody's on to something!" and decide that fucking gamers and a beloved game was the way to go.

I hope this isn't a trend because the games industry, from what I now understand, is on a bit of a precipice and this kind of thoughtless money-grabbing insanity is only going to tip them closer.

And those, my friends are the tales of greed and corporate stupidity I saw this week.  They are not unique and I wish more companies suffered greater consequences for their actions, but, in the case of EA, if I can help make people aware and make sure they don't spend money on a shoddy, nasty tactic, then I'll have done something worthwhile, even if it is a tiny thing.

^* Yes, yes.  Hard working and dedicated people get to the tops of companies all the time.  It's my perception, dude, get with it.  It also doesn't mean they're nice people.

^** Or blinding fucking sunshine as it is at the moment.  It's really damned inconvenient and it shouldn't happen in February.

^† That's the seeds of a political rant for another time, I think.  Fucking politician cunts.  See that?  It's anger.  Grrr.

^‡ Also known in some circles as minis or sad sodgies.

^§ A position sometimes occupied by Activision.

^§§ Or will I?

^§§§ Tweaks.

^§§§§ While not getting too distracted with it.  I have other things to do, you know.  I might release it for people to test it out.  How's that, eh?  Interested?  Comment.

^§§§§§ And keep an eye on that page, the number of negative reviews is only going to swell.


Will