Living in a Luddite revolution

Wow, no updates for two days! You must think the title of this blog is a bold faced lie. Well, to all the haters, I’m not dead but merely injured, technologically speaking. The Old Gods (or Virgin Media) have seen fit to take away both cable TV and broadband goodness. I don’t know what I could have done to offend them, except maybe skip on the virgin sacrifice a couple of times.


It’s difficult to comprehend how much I’ve come to rely on the interweb. For most of my life its always been there, like a benevolent deity granting me the power to plan journeys, check the latest televisial messages, stay connected to friends thousands of miles apart. You are everything interweb, so say we all.


If there ever were a Luddite revolution I’d have to go guerrilla partisan on their collective asses. Forgive them interweb God, for they know not what they do.

Covent Garden and the Covenant

Covent Garden brings on a fit of vivid memories: overpriced food, a suffocating miasma of tourists and usually silver painted twits pretending to be robots often scaring small children.



As part of Hellgate London’s replay-ability factor, the game randomly generates a version of famous London locations. One of these is Covent Garden, which you can tell from the video they managed to get rid of two out of the three annoyances. The hell spawn are actually buskers adapting to a new demographic.

illegal file sharing or fighting for louis harkell's soul

I saw this story today on the BEEEEB about Jammie Thomas, who was fined £109,000 for illegal file sharing. Apart from making the record industry look even more reactionary than usual, it reminded me of a story in the Guardian. This was a few years ago and to my surprise there in inky print was the name of my good friend Louis Harkell:

“Louis Harkell was fined for downloading music from Kazaa.”

“The last email I expected from my parents while teaching in Thailand was one saying I'd been fined £2,500 for downloading music from Kazaa. I had roughly 1,000 tunes, which I had made available for upload. Uploading is what turned out to be the illegal action. Yet never does it say on Kazaa that what you are doing is illegal.”

Liar, liar, digital downloads on fire. Not about Kazaa failing to mention the legal ramifications but he certainly had more songs than that. Teaching? Teaching what, how to steal?


“Having broadband and Kazaa meant I had hundreds of thousands of tunes at my fingertips. I'd write a list of tunes I wanted, queue them up before I went to bed and have a whole new section of music in the morning. I totally re-educated myself musically. When you compare that to slogging about a music store to buy an album which costs £12 and which has only two or three tracks on that you like, it's hard not to see why so many people do it.”

Walking around the neon lit racks of a Virgin Megastore is certainly an experience I don’t miss. The few legal tracks I have bought in the past couple of years have been from i-Tunes. But their policy of only being able to authorise a track five times is insane and impractical.


If you truly want to fight piracy you have to provide a viable alternative. Sites like Last FM and Pandora Radio are indicators of where the big players should be heading. A service that is usually quite accurate in determining similar songs you might like based on complex algorithms is a good idea. Anything with algorithms is a good idea; think how scientific the word sounds, A-L-G-O-R-I-T-H-M-S.

“I certainly won't be downloading music again. I know my friends will be less sure too. I've been burnt badly. Yet this does not make me look kindly upon the music industry, who dominate the production of music, feeding us glammed-up dross and getting upset when people go looking for something different.”


I haven’t learned anything. I still sail the seven digital seas, looting and pillaging, arrrrr. But Louis is quite right; your time is over record companies. With the advent of digital distribution and marketing that can be accomplished by the band/group themselves, what place is there for you in the future, unless you innovate?

The state of the Benunion

Why no love, Russia? If I talked about Putin or the fact that a William Gibson novel was partly based there, then would you change your mind?

Too much democracy for you China? I know, it's because of all the talk of 'firewalls' and such, isn't? Well, I'm not sorry, so there.

Why the cold shoulder Iceland?

Any suggestions on how to make these countries green, both on my google map and in the environmental sense, please comment below…

David Cameron conference speech (Facebook groups)

A second ago he mentioned how he cruises Facebook and found two groups: one called, 'Who else thinks David Cameron is a hottie?' had a few members. The second group, 'Am I the only one who doesn't like David Cameron?' had many more.

Oh, David, you've won me and all my yoot friends over with your talk of social networking and the Facebookness.

I suppose it's marginally more likely than Gordon Brown downloading the Pirate vs. Ninja's application...Stay out you dirty politicians with your 'down with the kids' buzzwords! I'm going to vote for the MCP this time round.

How much is music worth? You decide.

Radiohead are offering their new album, Rainbows, to fans for nothing. Their ‘honesty box’ experiment is an attempt to restructure how the music industry currently operates. Fans can pay nothing or whatever they deem fair for moans and electro bops. For die-hard fans a physical box set (real, I know, in this day and age?) that includes all the usual die-hard discards: photos, artwork, more songs etc will be on sale for £40.


I’m sure suits everywhere are sweating in anticipation of what the results will be. Buying an album by a high profile group for nothing (45p admin fee, come on, that’s still basically free, you tight bastards) is a first. Don’t worry, the money they make from tours, merchandise and extensive discography mean they won’t be thrown in the poor house just yet.


I haven’t bought a CD for nearly two years but that’s because I want to be a pirate, arrrrr. The truth is I’ll still buy albums of artists that I feel haven’t lost their way but that’s a dwindling few now and buying albums off iTunes is a joke. Only register a song to five separate machines? Damn you Steve Jobs!

Maglev railway makes Tube look even more rubbish

It’s all very well being the first to do something. The first one in the pool is never the rotten egg for example. But not keeping up to speed or in this case, continued development, means you’re worse than a rotten egg, you’re just rubbish.

The London Underground Railway was the first in the world, 1863 no less. The first trains were steam hauled and needed ventilation otherwise it would have been a sauna and not the kind you get in an exclusive day spar, with beautiful people but with normal dirty commuters. The cut-and-cover construction methods were made redundant with the advent of electric traction, which meant deeper tunnels. And so it should have continued. You build something and you try and improve upon it.

In the here and now the Tube is crap. It’s overcrowded, the signalling may as well be done by a guy shouting down the tunnel, “Your train still there Jim?” for all the good it does. The Oyster card system, I’m convinced, is a totalitarian Big Brother scheme.

In the Deutschland they’re planning the first magnetic track in Europe. With the train literally gliding over the track, much faster speeds can be achieved. And so Daily Mail readers everywhere, they may have lost the actual war but they’ve won the err, transport one. I wouldn’t mind a return to the steam hauled trains. Let’s make all of London a steam-punk paradise, choo-rific.

Journey of doom!

Don’t go to Martins Heron. I was forced at guilt point. You have a choice. If you don’t believe me, just travelling there is cursed. We got to Waterloo just in time to see the back of the train. Then I had to coax out of an inept ticket inspector where exactly we could buy some tickets and after nearly drawing an air diagram like an irate mime, he pointed across the station and said, ‘machine.’

Once on the next train, the power cut out and the doors wouldn’t open. A bizarre scratching noise was coming from one of the ceiling ventilators giving the whole scene over to the beginnings of a bad horror film.


The train finally left Waterloo twenty minutes late and another forty minutes later, filled only by bleak looking scenery, we arrived. There we were met by our hosts who informed us that we wouldn’t be going to the quaint, traditional pub for lunch but instead one in the middle of a junction.

No shrubberies here, just a concrete car park. The pub was called The Seagull or something and I was told that it used to be dog kennels, which gave the place a weird sense of inauthenticity. I mean you could tell anyway, but somehow the information made the darkened ceiling beams; huge hearth and old photographs seem even more out of place.


The food was ok and the wine was pretty good too, that was the only saving grace. From what I could tell there’s sweet fuck all to do in Martins Heron, apart from something we passed on the way called Coral World. The sign read, almost more as a plea than a statement of fact, ‘Start being excited.’

They should replace Martins Heron with a giant coral reef no one would mind

The Wild Gourmets aka Posh Butchers

Careening over wild landscapes in a vegetable oil powered Land Rover…it’s the kind of person or maybe the idea of the kind of person I’d like to be. But after watching the first episode of the Wild Gourmets I’ve decided there’s something inherently smug about these two.


Thomasina Miers and Guy Grieve, apart from their stupid names, obviously, have our old enemy, smugness, lurking around them. The one named Guy has this annoying habit of ‘getting stuck in’ so much so he should have it tattooed across his smug face. Anyone who describes himself or herself as an adventurer after the 19th century has got to be mentally unhinged.

Both their names are an indicator that they’re not exactly ‘salt of the earth,’ chances are some relation owns the land they’re cooking on.

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (River Cottage), Bruce Parry (Tribe), Ray Mears (Bushcraft), all these men of the wild (wildish for Hugh) have a charm when divulging the techniques they’ve learnt. The Gourmets are just annoying. I mean are they lovers? What’s the deal with all the bad in jokes? Maybe they’ll grow on me, like the fungus they had for dinner.

Facebook for cash

Facebook founder offers big bucks (£125,000) for new applications for the social networking site. Some I’ve been working on:

My narcissism has grown exponentially since joining Facebook app
Time wasted on Facebook counter app
Why does no one like me? app

Get cracking.

Adaptation, Charlie Kaufman and Ben Oliver

I feel like Charlie Kaufman in Adaptation. For those of you unfamiliar with the film’s premise, Charlie Kaufman is a real life screenwriter who wrote the surreal being John Malkovich. Adaptation is a post, post, post, so post in fact it can just about make out the ‘m’ in modern, film. It tells the story of Charlie as himself or at least a parody of himself. He’s finished writing Being John Malkovich and has been approached to write the screenplay for a recently published book, The Orchid Thief.

Charlie Kaufman being a perfectionist when it comes to conveying ‘the truth’ of any written piece finds it increasingly difficult to tackle the screenplay as he desperately tries to veer away from what he sees as the everyday mediocrity of most Hollywood scripts. His brother who has recently become a scriptwriter and has attended ‘screen writers’ conferences, with ‘Ten commandment’ style lists, compounds the problem. As Charlie struggles, trying to make something original, his brother’s paint by numbers script is instantly picked up.


What’s this got to do with me? Well, throughout the film Charlie is constantly struggling with, apart from his own neurosis, bewilderment and downright despair at the seemingly endless success of those who are obviously not very bright. This is likely to resonate with people in a multitude of professions.

It seems like a maxim that the majority of your immediate superiors will be mentally inept in someway. I’m not saying their bad people, just a bit thick. But it’s not just the bosses it can be colleagues of even complete strangers that ignite this feeling. You need only watch any of the various MTV, E-entertainment, and Living channels to see the proof of morons with success in practice.

This might all be thinly disguised jealously though. Like the sense of superiority that Charlie Kaufman feels towards his brother’s cliché writing style or the mainstream taste his agent champions, ultimately Larry learns the biggest lesson from his seemingly stupid brother. It wouldn’t be a compelling film or script if the lesson didn’t come too late.

Lawry Turner…I hate you

Hate’s a strong word and I can’t really hate someone I’ve just seen on the melt screen, but I do find her really unpleasant. She’s got this sort of Highgate/Crouch End mum smugness about her.

Today I saw her on the Wright Stuff talking about mothers who drink or smoke during pregnancy. Now I’ve always been of the opinion that in the same way we’re made to take tests to drive a car or fly a plane, there should definitely be a test for parenthood.

With the right sort of system all the ills that are said to plague this country, crime, idiots etc would simply disappear. Say what you like for personal freedom but if you know smoking a drinking is going to harm the small alien in your belly don’t do it. As the child doesn’t have the capacity to drink Captain Morgan’s and twenty Dunhill it shouldn’t be exposed. Until a child has reached the legal age of development and therefore is close enough physically to the malevolent human race, to be dubbed, ‘one of us’ then it needs nurturing until the age where it can decide for itself to become a alcoholic or flirt with death, whatever.

This is all going a bit off track. Lawry Turner is constantly annoying me over her stances towards, well, everything. Today she said, “Smoker’s are in denial, you can tell them, ‘hello’ you are killing yourself and they blank it out.” Ahhhhhhhhhhhh!

What is this? We’re not in the Orwellian police state just yet. I still have a choice, regardless of how illogical it might seem, to fill my lungs with sweet, sweet putrid smoke and guzzle, like the vast majority of this country, gallons of poisonous alcohol (don’t kid yourself alcohol is a poison hence, ‘what’s your poison?’) To have people, no, ‘non-smokers’ tell me I can’t flirt with death in a deeply philosophical way as I puff away makes me want to declare a fatwa.

This idea of smugness is pervasive, I should know because I’m a smug ecoer, as much as I can be but this isn’t the way things are meant to be.

Shuffling Zombie vs. sprinting Zombie

I just watched 28 Weeks Later. As far as I know, 28 Days, 28 Weeks and the Dawn of the Dead remake are the only zombies films to feature running zombies. Strictly speaking, the first two don’t really have zombies. Shuffling zombies can be found pretty much everywhere else. I think there’s a unique sense of fear behind both variants.

The Sprinting Zombie:



1. The sprinting zombie is terrifying because the possibility of outrunning it isn’t great. If it’s a true zombie than it doesn’t need to breathe, which puts your twenty pack a day lungs at a bit of a disadvantage.

2. They’re also harder to shoot. Again, if they’re proper zombies then usually only headshots count. Trying to shoot someone in the head whilst stationary (in a game) is hard enough.

3. No respite. This relates to the first point but lets say you manage to put some distance between you and the mindless horde, there is no guarantee, the reverse in fact, that they will lose interest on your Tesco Finest fed arse.

The Shuffling Zombie:


1. Decomposition. Being slow by nature the ravages of time and nature can usually leave the shuffler looking a lot more grotesque than their sprinting counterparts, possibly putting you off your lunch, stunning you with horror or making you miss.

2. The inevitability. Shufflers are on mass. That means you will never have enough ammo or strength to dispatch them all. Sooner or later one will bite you.

3. Lurkers. Whereas a sprinting zombie will make itself known by heavy footfalls, the lurker can seem to be dead, lying still on the floor or behind a corner but then chomp, game over.

There you have it. Which is your favourite?

PS-

Sean of the Dead and one scene from 28 Weeks Later were shot in and around Crouch End. It’s still being taken over by idiots, which are worse than zombies. More on that next time.

It's warm, therefore nice

Life affirming television. Not life affirming for me but reassuring for you. The shows that fall under this pulsing, umbrella of warmth are: Faking It, Made, Come Dine With Me, Coast and Mountain.


The first two follow the premise of nearly every underdog film ever made, ever. Get someone who’s life is shit or they’re under the impression their life is shit and turn them around in an allotted time frame. Roughly four to six weeks.


Go through the usual, wow this is amazing, no they’ll never do it in time, no I’ll never do it in time, big day, everything’s cool, life lessons learnt and that’s the show. Although the formula and outcome is as predictable as going to war without having a post conflict plan, you still watch for the human resilience and transformation beamed straight to your sockets.

The outcome isn’t always a happy one. I remember on one Faking It, there was a game’s tester or something, which wanted to become a racecar driver. He was one of the most arrogant idiots you will ever meet. No transformation, no win. That’s not bad actually; it could be the name of a self-help book or maybe a new religion.


The other shows rely on real people and in the case of Coast and Mountain: massive, majestic landscapes to help massage your gooey, warm, nerve centre. I’ve already talked about Come Dine With Me here. The other two roam around the United Kingpin, combining a history lesson about each locale with a heady mix of what we call ‘characters.’ This is a nice way of saying you’re either a bit whacky or a complete psychopath. In any case, it fills out each program nicely and reminds me that despite idiots constantly popping up on TV there’s a whole world of ‘characters’ and that’s got to be worth something…maybe.

It's now, now, now...wait...now!

I can't sing the praises of Google Current enough. The vast majority of the content is user generated. I.e. any crack fiend with a camera can make a film about being addicted to crack and be paid £250 for their trouble. It's like You've Been Framed but without the injuries and more dignity.
The sheer breath of pods (videos) is immense, covering everything from drug labs in Columbia to break dancing pensioners. Each pod averages three to eight minutes which is perfect for my short attent...hey, is that Jack? It's like being on Whackoffpedia, and repeatedly pressing the random article link without having to read!

The only downsides are the smugger than smug presenters that are a throw back to the VJs of MTV. Each one is a supermodel and each makes it quite obvious they are auto-pilot reading off an auto-cue. This isn't a massive surprise as most writers are so hideous that beautiful people are often required to read their words to the public. 'Eww, I don't even care what he's saying, he looks like someone just shat him out.'

Repeats is the other problem. If you watch it zealously enough like I do then you are bound to see the same pods and Google Current programs (news bulletins) very often. That's more a reflection of me as a shut in than it is of people not producing enough content. Go watch now!

Smugness is the silent killer

The 1UP show might have once started out as a group of enthusiastic games journalists, trying to create a visual forum; bringing together their individual gaming experiences for discussion. It’s now become a vanity and shit expulsion exercise.


Every new episode highlights a self-indulgent segment that either has them playing an ego boosting gaming tournament or having dinner with a developer mate, discussing how they can ‘own’ each other at a particular game.

Even if the gaming information you want is there, you have to pan through all the shit just to get a single gold nugget or maybe just a nugget. And the infinite use of the word ‘like’ in every sentence is enough to make you put a fatwa on the whole of Sans Francisco, where their smugness seeps out into the world.


Honestly, games journalism whether it is TV programmes or vid-casts needs to be more like Bits, early Games Master or the Charlie Brooker games special and needs to be less fucking smug.


Be more John Snow and less like one of the personality driven FOX news or CNN correspondents. Its not about you, its about the games and if you can’t communicate that sans your disgustingly over paid ego seeping through like infected bed soars, then stop all together. I want to learn about an upcoming game, event or technology in a concise and/or amusing way. They fail to do both. Boooo to smugness.

Wiiiii I’m a DJ

DJ WiiJ aka Jimmy Lesondak has a stupid smear of a square beard as if he just smelled his own shit and it manifested on his face. He uses two Wii motes to scratch, mix and generally be a prick. It might be an idea, if you get wind of him playing a show in your local area to bring all your spare Wii motes and catapult them at his stupid face, David and Goliath style.


Chances are you wont even be blamed for the subsequent death by Wii (sounds like a snuff film) because as we all know Wii motes are notorious for breaking off at the strap.


Chances are he’ll become incredibly successful and grow obese from all the drugs, adulation and groupies he’s digested. All hail Baron Harkonen!