02.21.07
Posted in games at 6:37 pm by Rob Fahey
Since the company which makes the nice, comfortable contact lenses I’ve used for four years has decided to stop making them – thus leaving me with unpleasant, painful ones to wear instead – I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I’m going to have to wear glasses more often in future. In acknowledgement, I’ve acquired a new pair – nearly 250 quids (ouch!) worth of eye-enhancement technology.
I’m not entirely sure whether they make me look like an utter fucking prick or not, since they’ve got a bit of an unpleasant Hoxton Square Media Twat feel to them, but at least they’re nice and comfortable, I guess.
Speaking of Media Twats, I noticed that the odious GamesRadar managed to get its knuckles rapped by some of the more reputable gay news sites this week for publishing this frankly incredibly offensive article. Anyone who knows me will know that I’m very laid back about my sexuality and don’t get remotely uptight about friendly insults or jokes about gay people, but in this instance, I was pretty genuinely shocked that nobody at Future had the cop-on to think “hey, maybe this isn’t actually funny and will upset people”.
The author, one Matt Cundy, has clearly never actually met a gay person – not that he’s afraid of them, if any of them tried anything on he’d just deck the lot of them! – and exists in some kind of sniggering 14-year old twilight world where The Gays are flamboyant, camp, sexually perverted woman-haters who exist out there somewhere. As opposed to, say, being a widespread demographic of people, and probably a good five to ten per cent of your readership. I can understand that one individual, Matt Cundy, might be this sheltered – but the fact that not a single editor at GamesRadar, a well-funded and high profile site run by a huge publishing company, saw this as off-colour and offensive is frankly astonishing. Fucking poor show.
That said, I guess I’d probably be pretty disappointed if any fellow Friend of Dorothy had poor enough taste to read that godawful e-rag anyway.
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Posted in toys at 12:33 am by Rob Fahey
Abrahamic religion, I have decided, is carefully structured to encourage hypocrisy through means of tasty things. Despite being staunchly atheist since the age of 13 or so (prior to which I simply thought the whole idea was a bit silly, but probably didn’t know the word “atheist”), I find Christmas and Easter utterly irresistible – not because of the birth or death of Christ, but because of Christmas Cake, Mince Pies, Turkey, Trifle, Brandy Butter and Chocolate Coins in midwinter, and great big whopping eggs made of chocolate (not to mention Simnel Cake and an inevitable lamb roast) in spring. As a Celt, I argue that this harks back to the fine festivals which Christianity usurped in the first place – this is, of course, retroactive reasoning, because I like eating tasty things.
Similarly, while Lent means nothing to me, the day immediately preceding this solemn time of fasting is endlessly enticing with its promise of pancakes. I really enjoy making pancakes, and am rather partial to consuming them as well; they’re a uniquely wonderful foodstuff, one of the few which changes from main course to dessert depending on what topping you choose. At this evening’s mini-feast, dessert began when we ran out of sausages, and replaced it with chocolate sauce and raspberry ice cream. I confess that this happened rather earlier in the proceedings than a nutritional advisor might have considered wise.
Every time I make pancakes for Shrove Tuesday, I promise myself that I’ll do it more often in future – they’re an incredibly simple and fun thing to make, and there’s nothing quite like bacon, sausages, pancakes and freshly ground coffee on a Sunday morning to make the lazy day at the end of the week seem worthwhile. I never keep this promise, though, with the result that when I set out to attempt pancake-making again 12 months later, I’m a rank amateur again, and am forced to hide the first few sad, deformed pancakes from the light of day. Rumours that I hide them in my belly may hold some substance.
For a set of religions largely focused on abstinence, fasting and general guilt and misery, Christianity seems rather good at keeping people adhering to its various festivals with the temptation of delicious treats. Then again, I shouldn’t be surprised – how many Catholic priests would bother saying mass on a Sunday if they didn’t get to prance around with some nubile altar boys in the process? A fine application of the carrot from a religion better known for the stick.
Speaking of sticks, I’d quite like to hit someone at Orange with one – or even several, should the initial sticks fail me during the course of this prolonged beating. Having agreed to upgrade my phone last week, they warned me that the new phone would come with a SIM, so the old SIM will stop working at some point. The old SIM duly gave up the ghost this evening.
Unfortunately, there’s no sign of my bloody phone, which leaves me completely unable to make or receive calls until it arrives. Which is just great.
(In other news – hi, LiveJournal Friends List! After playing around with the RSS-feed-to-Livejournal idea for my blog, I’m now just cross-posting entries using an automagic piece of plugin wizardry suggested by Mart, who writes a blog featuring both towels AND cats. You can remove the annoying RSS thing from your friends list, if you want. Or just leave it, if you want to read all my wisdom twice.)
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02.18.07
Posted in films, music at 12:42 am by Rob Fahey
It’s a sad state of affairs, in a sense, but my exposure to popular culture from this side of the planet is extremely limited. I know vastly more about modern music in Japan and Korea than I do about its US and UK equivalents – an attitude cemented recently by my newfound love for hip-hop music, which has focused almost solely on the output of East Asian artists because I find the attitudes and outlook that go hand in hand with western rap and hip-hop absolutely abhorrent, so much so that I can’t really enjoy the music.
As a result of this, and of my general disdain for broadcast mediums, I really haven’t got a clue what’s going on with mainstream music. I don’t watch TV – I don’t even have a TV, and the only one in the house is a set in Nic’s room which is tuned in with a very dodgy set-top aerial for things like The World Cup or The London Bombings. I don’t listen to radio, having had a strong desire to avoid all such things instilled in me by working in an office for about a year and a half where the girls outnumbered the boys and insisted on Radio 1 at least three days a week (no offence to any ladies reading, who no doubt have excellent musical taste – but can’t you just do something about the rest of your gender? They’re letting the side down!).
This whole situation has progressed to the point where essentially my only exposure to what’s new in popular music is through – this is a bit odd, I’ll grant – the Gili Gulu sushi buffet restaurant in Covent Garden. Bear with me. Gili Gulu is about the best all-you-can-eat sushi place in London (and one of the only ones, for that matter), and is a regular place of pilgrimage on hung-over Sundays; the sushi isn’t fantastic, but it’s fresh and tasty, and there’s something innately cleansing about steamed white rice, cold, slithery fish slices and the sharp tang of wasabi on a day when you’ve woken up with a tongue like an over-used sink sponge. They do, however, play MTV on a number of plasma screens – possibly in an attempt to make people eat up and fuck off as quickly as possible.
It’s here that I get to see modern popular music (christ, I sound like someone’s grandad). Normally, this consists of pointing at the screen with a pair of chopsticks and asking “who the fuck is this” around a mouthful of salmon nigiri, but it does mean that once every few weeks I get to find out what other, normal, people are listening to at the moment (the other sources of my musical knowledge are Chris and Tom – they don’t count as normal). Last time out, I was quite pleased with my haul – I discovered that Muse are rather good, and have been happily singing along to Black Holes and Revelations ever since (I suspect that the title track may become a karaoke favourite, a bit of variety which will please my karaoke chums – who normally have to put up with an endless stream of angsty Gackt ballads, gay Arashi boy-pop and shouty Asian Kung-Fu Generation rock-howling), and I also developed quite a taste for Jamelia’s new track, Beware of the Dog, which is based off Depeche Mode’s Personal Jesus and is rather good fun. Western hip-hop, as I mentioned, normally turns me off – but Jamelia was quite genuinely funny and rude on Never Mind The Buzzcocks recently, so she’s fine in my book.
My other policy for finding new music to listen to is to ignore people’s FAVOURITE BEST NEW BAND IN THE WORLD EVER recommendations, and only listen to stuff after people have been recommending it for at least a year. That does mean that I was enjoying the Scissor Sisters and Franz Ferdinand about two years after everyone else thought they were good, but who’s fucking keeping score, eh? On the other hand, this method is far from foolproof – it completely failed on one memorable occasion and led to me buying an album of ear-shrivelling shit by The Killers. It’s not the eight quid I mind so much as the half-hour of aural suffering, really. Although I could have bought nearly 23 Twix bars with that eight quid (a method of valuation of all physical goods introduced by my housemate Chris – it falls down a bit when you try to apply it to mortgages or corporate takeovers, although using king-size Twix bars can help), and even though I’d have thrown up after eating them all, it would still have been more enjoyable.
In other news, you should probably go and see Hot Fuzz. I enjoyed it even more than I had been expecting, which is to say, Quite A Lot. Anyone who has ever spent more than a couple of days in a small town (I endured over 18 years of it, personally, although I’ll grant that the first five or so were a bit oblivious – come to think of it, so were the last three, albeit for quite different reasons) will find the last 20 minutes to be the ultimate release of rather a lot of your most cherished fantasies. Some girls two rows ahead of us seemed to think likewise, although worryingly, I think that their fantasies are going to be expressed in slash fanfiction about Nick Frost and Simon Pegg. I guess it takes all sorts.
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02.16.07
Posted in games, toys at 12:04 am by Rob Fahey
The BBC ran a particularly awful piece on Watchdog this week about the fact that Xbox 360s currently have a lower life-expectancy than teenagers in my neighbourhood, and that Microsoft UK are being shits about sorting it out for poor numpties who bought their product expecting it to actually, you know, work and so on.
Now, I do sympathise – although perhaps not with the frightening creatures from the blackest depths that they dragged up blinking into the light to act as the Faces of Gaming for the programme – one of whom was exposed to excess oestrogen in the womb and has the face of a trout, the other of whom appeared to have some kind of mechanical device lodged in his ear and spoke with such a dense rural accent that I expected him to end each sentence with “Mr Frodo”. Their awfulness was offset only by having the lovely Ellie on to actually speak some bloody sense on the matter.
No, I sympathise in a more general sense I suppose – after all, my first Xbox 360 died a horrible death only a month or so after buying it, and when Microsoft failed to get back to me about fixing the fucker (it was a freebie) within, er, five months or so, I went out and bought a core system to replace it. I wasn’t about to miss out on Dead Rising based fun for the sake of a mere 200 quid, dammit. Still, I was rather miffed.
Not, I’ll grant you, as miffed as I was when I turned on my Xbox 360 on the evening that the BBC broadcast their hard-hitting report on how lank-haired trout-faced men are getting wobbly bottom lips due to Microsoft’s intransigence. “I know,” thought I, “I’ll kick some men in the fucking face and knock them off some big fucking buildings in this Crackdown game that Tom has been blathering on about!”
Ah. No, perhaps I won’t then.
Perhaps I’ll just be a bit sad about the fact that for no apparent reason, my 200 pound piece of hardware has decided that six months is a pretty good innings, and it has nothing left to live for.
Yep, that’ll definitely be how I’ll spend my evening. Those three lights, according to the MS knowledge base, mean “you’re right fucked, mate”. Helpfully, they also refuse to actually sort out this problem (i.e. arrange a pick up for my now deceased console and send me a new one) over email, so I’ll have to talk to a helpdesk moron in person – here’s hoping they have something REALLY GREAT for me to listen to while I’m on hold for an hour!
Note how my PS3 and one of my PS2s are both silently mocking their Xbox cousin, as if to say, “look at that stupid dead bastard!”
Oh well. On the plus side, the next day the Sennheiser wireless headphones I’ve been coveting for two years arrived from an eBay seller who miraculously had a brand new sealed pair for about a third of the retail price. They’re ridiculously huge but also incredibly light and comfortable, and I’ve found myself on a number of occasions walking downstairs to take a piss and not realising I’m still wearing them, which makes me look like a complete knob. However, I’m easily pleased, and the novelty of being able to walk to the other side of the room to look for something while still listening to music on my headphones probably won’t wear off until well into 2008.
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02.15.07
Posted in web, writing at 12:53 am by Rob Fahey
Well, I do. The evidence is pretty much undeniable.
Actually, I’ve been fucking around with WordPress for some time now, but never actually got around to putting it “live” so to speak. Still, everyone else has one of these things, and the opportunity to vent opinions that nobody will pay me to publish is certainly appealing. Much of whatever I scrawl here will probably end up duplicated across my LiveJournal and maybe even, god forbid, my MySpace – but it’s my little chunk of the blogging revolution, god damn it, and that’s what counts. So there.
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