Blue Man Sings the Whites

In honour of the release of the Top Gun Anthem for Guitar Hero III, here are the Top 5 Bits Of Music That Can Make Anything You Do Seem Awesome.

5. Ride Of The Valkyries
4. Push It To The Limit - Paul Engemann
3. The Can-Can
2. Dambusters March
1. Theme From The Professionals

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Apologies for the paucity of updates, but work is energy-sappingly hectic at the moment. I really want to get a post together to help me sift through my thoughts regarding GTAIV, and this weekend I’ll have another crack at writing the post on the career of Canoe Reeves that I’ve been turning over in my head for the last couple of months.

Seriously.

In the meantime, have a couple of links that are capable of destroying an entire day’s productivity apiece.

The Have Your Say section on the BBC website is a place where the hoi polloi are invited to comment on the burning issues of the day.

This works exactly as well as you’d imagine.

As Charlie Brooker pointed out in his excellent Screenwipe special about TV news, in recent years there has been a desire to make news reporting seem inclusive and interactive by, for example, getting “the public’s reaction” to every story from random proles on the street. This has led inevitably to more and more screen-time being taken up by people who know bog-all.

(I mean why? I KNOW what the public’s reaction is, I AM the bloody public. Why do you care what my reaction is anyway? You’re the ones with the contacts, the resources and the technology to have some idea what the fuck is going on with whatever it is, it’s YOUR reaction I’m interested in. Isn’t telling me your reaction the entirety of your bloody JOB?)

Anyway. Have Your Say is an offshoot of this touchy-feely, everyone’s-opinion-matters inclusiveness. Anyone can post there, and so anyone inevitably does. I sincerely hope that it has a special attraction to the worst kind of toweringly self-important pig-ignorant reactionary halfwit, because the idea that your average HYS thread might actually be an accurate cross-section of public opinion is genuinely frightening. In addition to having one of the greatest domain names of all time, ifyoulikeitsomuchwhydontyougoandlivethere.com highlights the most self-important, the most ignorant and the most reactionary comments of the lot. Some posters are misguided, some are derranged and some are genuinely fucking repugnant.

Oh, and some are pure comedy gold. If I didn’t laugh, I’d cry. Yercuddntmakeitup!

If you feel that getting an insight into the thought-processes of the wingnuts with whom you’re sharing the planet’s precious resources might be too much for you on a Friday afternoon, you might want to try the altogether gentler LOLs on offer at Judge A Book By Its Cover. A collection of badly-conceived, badly-executed, bizarre or simply hideous book covers, it provides roughly the same WTFness levels as spEak You’re bRanes without the “making me want to smash a two-pound lump-hammer into my face” thing.

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How in God’s name are you meant to know when to stop buttering a crumpet?

A nanosecond after spreading the butter, it melts and falls down the holes, leaving it in an uncertain state somewhere between butteredness and non-butteredness. You could potentially collapse the probability waveform by biting into it, but unbuttered crumpet is like eating a bathroom sponge so it’s probably better safe than sorry. So you put on some more butter, which goes the way of the first. So you try some more butter. And some more, only stopping maybe half an hour later when you realise that your crumpet is now an island floating in a sea of cooling yellow grease.

Crumpet is a fun word to say. Crumpet crumpet crumpet.

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Hello, you!

Sorry no updates over the last couple of weeks. To get you all caught up, I did the road-trip to Bolton on Easter Saturday. It was a long day - out of the house at 8am, home about 1am - but an absolutely brilliant experience.

In the main tournament I made it through the first two breaks but went absolutely card-dead for about two hours. I’m just not a good enough player to keep my stack ticking over if I don’t have the cards, plus I think I was a little intimidated by the game and the setting. I ended up pushing in from second position for about twice the big blind with K10 suited, but the button’s pocket 9s stood up to put me out about 90th in a field of 148.

I then played in a £20 sit-and-go and managed to piss away my early chip lead by playing an awful lot of legitimately terrible poker. Recognising I was a tired and tilty, I elected to spend the rest of the evening as a railbird.

Still, I had a great time despite being really disappointed with my play. I ended up travelling with a bunch of regulars from the Tuesday night game who wouldn’t otherwise have been able to make it, and they proved to be a thoroughly excellent group to spend several hours cooped up in a very small car with.

Plus, I’m now a member of a casino. Which really makes me feel very James Bond indeed.

Then this weekend, I got my hair cut for the first time in about 5 years. On the upside, I now look roughly 20% less like the Comic Book Guy. On the downside, my famous Cousin It impression is now a thing of the past.

By way of illustration, I’ve pretty much gone from Bill Bailey to Action Man.

After spending most of Saturday whimpering in a foetal position, I’ve now progressed to the stage where I’m only 40% traumatised and 60% convinced it was probably for the best.

AND THEN today, on getting back from my lunchbreak I was faced with this:

I didn’t have the nerve to ask the burly hard-hatted men in the vicinity if it was meant to be scaffolding for Jedi, or scaffolding by Jedi.

Either way guys, two words - Force Levitate.

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Gary Gygax, father of Dungeons & Dragons, has died aged 69.

Your ludicrously overcomplicated, massively unrealistic, batshit insane roleplaying system took up more hours of my teenage years than I care to remember, Gary. I still don’t understand why you wanted us to roll high to hit but low for saving throws, and now your character sheet’s gone to the big punch-pocket folder in the sky I’ll never get to ask.

So long, and thanks for all the half-elves.

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…which is a bloody tricky maneuver, let me tell you.

The fact that I almost never remember my dreams is a source of occasional wistful regret. I’ve always believed that the fact that I don’t have access to the meanderings of my subconscious has held me back creatively, and I really, really don’t need much holding back creatively.

On the evidence of last night, perhaps it’s as well I don’t usually remember. My subconscious is apparently really, really boring.

I was playing poker in a place of no particular import or character. The other players, as generic and forgettable as the room, folded round to me on the small blind. I peeled up the corners of my hole cards, saw the jack and nine of hearts and called. The big blind - a schoolfriend I haven’t seen or spoken to in about fifteen years - raised. I called the second bet.

The flop came down with the king of clubs and the seven and eight of hearts, giving me flush, straight and straight flush draws. I bet out, and was raised again. I called the raise, and the turn was dealt - and it was the miracle card, the ten of hearts, making me an unbeatable straight flush.

I bet, and was immediately raised again. I took one more peek at my cards to make absolutely sure I was playing what I thought I was playing - and I wasn’t. I had an ace of diamonds and the eight of spades. “Oh my god!” I thought, aghast. “I bet out on the flop with second pair!”

And then I woke up. To coin a phrase.

Yeah. Thanks, subconscious. Samuel Taylor Bloody Coleridge gets to visit Kubla Khan’s sacred pleasure-dome and compose a 1000-line epic poem in his dreams, I get this. Fantastic.

Admittedly, I’m fairly sure Coleridge didn’t play as much online poker as I do.

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I’m not sure what it is about the security industry that results in so many firms having terrible names. Even print companies, every single one of which is seemingly under legal obligation to have the words “Colour” and “Print” in their name, aren’t anywhere near as bad.

It seems that bad security firm names generally fall into one of three categories; Obvious Overcompensation (see Scorpion Security, Magnum Security, Tough Systems, S.A.S. Alarms), You Keep Using That Word. I Do Not Think It Means What You Seem To Think It Means (i.e. Radium Security, X-Ray Alarms, Nova Security) or else Didn’t Really Think It Through (Aztek Services, Cartel Security Systems, Mercury Alarm Systems, B.S. Alarms).

Anyway. Here are my ten favourites. All, I’m afraid, are completely genuine.

Honourable Mention - Panther Security
I watch way too many Will Ferrell movies. They make your alarm with bits of real panther. So you know it’s good. 60% of the time it works every time.

Honourable Mention - Futuretech
You’re not fooling anyone, you know.

10 - Ambush Security
I just like the mental image. Presumably, they wait until the burglar’s almost gotten off your premesis before leaping out from behind a pot-plant.

9 - Solar Security
Generally speaking, you’re not looking for a security system that stops working at night.

8 - S.W.A.T. Security & Alarms
Just trying way too hard.

7 - Secure-A-Site
Not trying anything like hard enough.

6 - A.P.E. Alarms
Their motto - “Pay Peanuts - Get Us.”

5 - Avant Garde Security
This calls to mind a man in a tutu and a motorcycle helmet monitoring your site entirely through the medium of interpretive dance.

4 - Quantumatic CCTV & Surveillance
You keep using that word. I do not think it means… er, anything.

3 - Vault Vision
Worst. Superpower. Ever. Seriously. “The criminials are getting away!” “Never fear! I shall use my ability to SEE as if I were in a VAULT! Oh… oooooh… errr… hasn’t it gone dark all of a sudden?”

2 - Watchman Security
Remember, you’ll need to budget extra to hire someone else to watch them.

1 - Atlantis Security
Names that they originally considered and rejected before settling on this one include Pompeii Security, Bermuda Triangle Security, Mary Celeste Security, East Of Java Security and Oh My Fucking God Help Help We’re All Going To Fucking Die Security.

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Spotted on a shopping expedition this afternoon:

How smart would the price have to be for this before you’d consider buying it? And how many names do you think they went through before deciding that this was the winner? Personally, I’d have plumped for “Mock-A-Rella“.

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“So, what do you do?”

I work as a technical support analyst for a security equipment manufacturer. This largely involves doing quite intricate, quite dull things whose significance is utterly lost on anyone not familiar with the minutiae of the alarm receiving industry in general and how our units operate in particular.

I also suck at small talk.

This combination of banality, complication and incompetence makes it pretty difficult to know how to respond to everyone’s perennial favourite icebreaker. Particularly given that the truthful response would probably be “not an awful lot”, as this little insight to my working environment will doubtless illustrate.

From left to right, then, that’s a tin of “Oil Slick”-coloured Thinking Putty, my fiddle-toy of choice. It’s nice to squeeze between your fingers whilst pondering a conundrum that would be impenetrable to mortal minds. It’s also immensely satisfying to rip into shreds in a display of manly might and rage if you’re on the phone to a particularly clueless installer. I’m mildly addicted to this stuff, actually – there’s a tin of Lustrous Bronze in my drawer in case I fancy a change of pace, and a few more colours at home including the lovely glossy black - a groovy and mildly freaky live-roleplay prop if your character has a dot of two of Obtenebration. Which given the choice, they obviously should have.

Next to that is the magnetic dartboard that was a present from Blue Man Jr. last Christmas. It’s a particularly excellent example of the breed, with three little cutaways on one side of the board allowing the darts to sit securely tucked away until you pull the little handle at the top to pop them halfway out. The darts themselves have nicely strong little rare-earth magnets in the tips which allow for bonus “trying to push the two magnets that share the same polarity together, ooooh it can’t be done!” fidgety fun.

Then there’s my constant companion in times of trouble, the trusty pearly-white DS Lite, seen here recovering from a heavy lunchtime Picross session via a USB charging lead - the best £1.95 I’ve spent in a long while. The best £25 I’ve spent in a long while is the R4 that now lives in the DS’s cartridge slot, allowing me to carry around my entire games collection at once, plus nice little homebrew oddities like PDA/media player/doodlepad application DSOrganise. I loved my old DS Fat, but it could be a trifle uncomfortable to use over extended periods of time. The Lite is much improved in that respect, and at least 35% better all round with a bigger, thicker, easier-to-use stylus and screens so bright that if you hold it too near your face you end up going the same way the Nazis did at the end of Raiders Of The Lost Ark.

Sitting on the top of my switcher box is a sock monkey. Hello, sock monkey! He reminds me of the TV ads that a major security company ran last year that depicted a bunch of howling apes running rampant through the streets. This tickled me in ways that I can’t really go into on a blog that people could potentially find by googling my name. Sorry about that.

Next to the monkey is the model of Yangus from thoroughly agreeable PS2 epic Dragon Quest VIII that I picked up for three quid in the Forbidden Planet sale. I’ve never liked a computer game character enough to want to own a toy of them before, and when he arrived it felt like some nerd rite-of-passage. In the game, Yangus is a fat, surly bandit with half a conker on his head, trousers that MC Hammer would have killed for and a voice provided by TV’s famous Ricky Grover. My only issue with the otherwise utterly awesome action figure is that you can’t do everyone’s favourite Yangus “bit” with it.

(Note – Yangus is now holding his axe guitarishly across his body, with his right hand held over his head poised to perform a Pete-Townshendian windmill. This has upped his badassery quotient by a good 20%, but I really can’t be bothered to take another picture. Sorry.)

Then there’s the lenticular “film clip” that came with my Super Nerd-O Tin Edition of the Blade Runner rerelease. It’s spectacularly pointless, but quite nice.

Given my tendency to accumulate crap and the natural drawing-power of things that distract me from doing any actual work, it’s currently estimated that by August 2010 the swelling ranks of toys will have gathered together for a final offensive and pushed me off my desk altogether.

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Have you ever realised that you’ve made a decision then, when asked for your reasons, had to fling together a bunch of plausible-sounding justifications to convince the person you’re talking to - and, more importantly, yourself - that it was anything other than a knee-jerk, instinctive reaction? Have you ever realised that in actual fact you have no idea whatsoever why you made the choice you did?

Terrifying, isn’t it?

Have you ever wondered where these decisions are coming from? Is that your subconscious is tremendously efficient, able to crunch the numbers and come to the “right” choice faster than your conscious mind can “show your working”? Is it simply that we’re just a congealed blob of water, chemicals and electrical impulses moulded by thousands of years of evolution into a grab-bag of thinly-disguised, deeply-ingrained survival instincts?

Have you ever noticed that 90% of people are basically just taking up valuable resources? That the vast majority of the population are just waddling around sucking up oxygen and petrochemicals whilst pumping out carbon, ignorance and absolutely nothing of any material or spiritual worth? Most of humanity grind out humdrum existences grey as the north London sky, throwing away half their waking hours on jobs that exist only to produce crap that the world would be better off without.

Have you ever worried that you’re part of that 90%?

Have you ever played The Sims? It’s a strangely eerie game. Effectively, it creates a little person in your computer whose entire life is entirely dependant on your whims. Where they go, who they talk to, what they wear, where they work, what they buy, everything falls under your control. If you have even a vestigial sliver of a conscience, you desperately want to do right by your alter ego, want them to be comfortable, to be fit, to get their end away once in a while, to be, y’know, happy. Unfortunately, despite your best efforts it’s all to easy to make the wrong decisions, to see your Sim fall short of a dream career and true love and end up having them settle for an OK job, whoever will have them and a nagging sense that you’ve let them down.

Or you can just remove all the doors and toilets from their house while they’re inside it and watch them slowly crumble into lonely insanity before dying in a pool of their own filth. You know. Whatever floats your proverbial.

Have you ever realised that we’re all characters in God’s great role-playing game?

Each of us is a marionette that won’t let ourselves see the strings, fooling ourselves into thinking we’re making our own reasoned decisions while dancing to the tune of a distant celestial puppetmaster. Most of the players are doing their best for us, but either aren’t that committed or aren’t that good at the game, but there are enough l33t and enough cruel/juvenile/rubbish players to have plenty of characters that stand out at either end of the spectrum of success. On the upside, this means there is no death. Every exit is just a respawn somewhere else.

Doesn’t our daily grind make a lot more sense if it’s being carried out at the behest of someone who, as in The Sims, just sees us go off to work in the morning then immediately return with the number representing our bank balance spinning upward?

The endless horde of semi-sentient traffic-cones that we have to manoeuvre around every day? NPCs, taking up just enough of the universe’s processing time to amble through a semi-regular routine, leave moronic posts on internet forums and vote in otherwise-inexplicable numbers for the winner of X-Factor, but never having sufficiently complex AI to actually seem real.

Have you ever found yourself getting a bit odd if you haven’t had enough sleep? Yeah. Me too.

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