Files and Records

Category: Random Wednesday

  • Instant Gratification, the Internet at it’s Finest

    Above all things that are great about the Internet, the instant gratification of needs and desires is the one I love the most.  Second to that is Google’s amazing ability to find the answer to just about anything, third is Wolfram Alpha’s fantastic website.  But I digress.  Actually, it’s probably the second best thing about the internet.  Social Media is the best.  I can be social from behind my screen and no-one would ever guess what an anti-social b’stard I can be.  Unless I told them.  Oh.  Ah, well.  On with the post…

    Instant Gratification.  It’s lovely!  I’ve had an Android phone for over a year now and between the Kindle app and the Amazon music store I can get pretty much anything I want.  Instantly.  Well, I say “instantly”, it’s as instant as the broadband speeds up here allow for and that’s still faster than buying a book or a CD.  If I upgrade the card in my phone from a 2Gb to a 16 or 32, I can ditch my old iPod completely!

    Example a.  The Detroit Social Club.  Until a few weeks ago, I’d never heard of the band.  Didn’t know they existed.  Then this fantastic song, “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” was used in the soundtrack to an episode of Being Human.  Song ID app on the phone told me who had done it, Amazon MP3 store provided a link.  One click and 79p later a new band had entered my life.  Superb.  I haven’t bought their album yet, but I have listened to it a few times on Spotify at work.  I’ll get it one of these days.

    Example b.  Spotify.  Anyone who says that all the world’s music is on there can go fish.  Colin Hay’s new album, Gathering Mercury, isn’t on there, nor was his last album.  Be that as it may, a lot of the world’s music is on there.  The violinist, David Garrett, appeared on ITV’s Dancing On Ice for the final.  Yes, I watch DoI, but I’m heartily sick of the Bolero.  Monday comes round and I’m writing some code, needing some music to listen to, and I end up on Spotify with a huge playlist of Garrett’s past albums.  Classical Pop/Rock is a bit hit and miss, so there’s definitely some cherry-picking needed to get the good stuff.  But you can do that!  You can choose which tracks you want, which you don’t.  Much, much better than buying a physical CD.

    Example c.  The Kindle.  “Bugger,” thought I.  “Train journey tomorrow and I haven’t a thing to read!”  Along comes a blog post, a re-tweet via Twitter, IIRC, and suddenly I’ve a new author to follow and a techno-thriller to pass the hours between Edinburgh and York.  Spot-onski.  And it was how I discovered the excellent “Writing Therapy” by Tim Atkinson. (On the Amazon Kindle Store)

    Example d.  Random advertising tweets.  You know how it goes on Twitter.  You mention “marmalade” once and suddenly you’re followed by half-a-dozen marmalade-themed bots and the British Marmalade Lovers Society is re-tweeting your stuff.  I made a comment to a friend, @RequestFriday, on Bute FM that he should get some more Prog Rock on his show, mentioning a couple of bands – Nightwish and Avantasia to be precise.  A few hours later I receive a tweet from @SilentFall, a French Prog Rock band, promoting their new album.  And it’s on Amazon for download.  An hour later, I’m out for a run listening to this excellent album.  If I hadn’t commented on Twitter, it could’ve been years before this band came on to my radar.  But mostly these random tweets just get blocked and reported for spam.

    But it’s not just the near-instantaneous nature of the gratification, it’s the finding new stuff.  Thanks to Twitter, the Kindle, sites like Spotify which list related and similar artists, I now know of a whole host of new artists and writers to draw from.  It’s enriching my musical and literary world.  And there’s not many places you can say do that now!

    If the internet were to shut down tonight, apart from wondering what to do with my HTML and PHP skills and how I’d fill the hours now that Twitter’s not there, I’d miss the exploration, the thrill of discovery, and the instant gratification of downloading a writer or musician’s entire back catalogue.  The internet truly is a wonderful resource.

    So in the past month, I’ve discovered several new authors and albums by bands I’d never even heard of.  Without the Internet I would have lived in blissful ignorance of their existence.  Don’t get me wrong, I love browsing book stores.  I love the feel of a physical book in my hand, the smell of the paper, the very ambience of the store itself.  And if you find a bookshop like Cogito in Hexham  use them to the very limit of your wallet, they’re rare beasts indeed.

    Over to you.  What has the internet delivered to you this last month?  Who or what have you discovered that you never knew you couldn’t live without before?

  • To reduce stress levels, just give up (gaming) #randomwednesday

    I gave up on a computer game last year.  Just stopped playing.  I don’t know whether my fingers are losing their responsiveness now that I’m getting old, but I just could not get past the first boss fight.  And this was only about 5 minutes in to the game.  Fortunately, it was one I had borrowed so I could return it from whence it came and not worry about it any more.  If I’d stumped up cash for the damn thing, I might’ve tried a little harder.

    Then I started playing Tomb Radier: Anniversary.  I’ve played the Tomb Raider games since the start, loved the thrill of exploration, the searching for secret areas, the wanton destruction of endangered species.  The series has had its high points – Tomb Raider itself, Tomb Raider 3 – and its low points – Tomb Raider 2 was too hard, the latest one too short on the PS2 – but I’ve stuck with it.  I’ve only missed out on playing one of the games, Angel of Darkness I think it was called, but I understand from reviews that I’ve not missed much.

    Tomb Raider: Anniversary is a remake of the original game using the updated graphics of Tomb Raider: Legend.  Visually, it is a thing of beauty.  Puzzles that were simple “flick switches, run around and stomp pressure pads” became far more interesting.  And the environment?  Wow!  Gorgeous.  But they’d tweaked combat, introduced a bullet-time-esque special move that you could use to pull off a one-shot kill, and this is where my problems with the game started.  I could not, no matter what I tried, master this move.  Not an issue with the little beasties, the wolves and bears of the game, but when it came to the dinosaurs I started to find the combat a little tough even on the easiest difficulty.  I battled on, killed the dinos, progressed to the centaur mummy things with shields.

    Back in the first few Tomb Raider games, before they started moving towards the unkillable monsters you just had to avoid, combat was simple:  Pump as many rounds of ammunition into the target as you could and it would die.  The bigger the bad, the more ammunition you needed.  You’d work your way through magnum, uze and shotgun rounds and end up running around whatever it was blasting away with your pistols – pistols that never, ever, needed reloading.  This bullet-time special move thing broke that.  I wouldn’t mind so much if it was a case of “pull off the special move and you’ll finish the combat much quicker”, but it wasn’t.  This move became required.  Somehow I managed to pull it off twice without dying and moved on to the aliens.  Then it was needed again and I’d lost my mojo.  Died many times in succession, got cross, nearly wrecked a controller.  And then I had a flashback to the previous year and just gave up.  I felt so much better.  I shelved the game, moved on to something far more fun, and haven’t gone back to it since.

    There’s talk of another Tomb Raider game at the moment.  I don’t know if I’ll bother or not.  You changed too much last time, guys.  And if the “old” gamers don’t buy a game, the young gamers won’t because they don’t have the cash.

    The take-home message from this post is this:  It’s your cash. You spent it on the game to have fun, not to raise your blood pressure and aim for that heart-attack. You could always trade it in for Lego Harry Potter.

  • Can we have another power cut, please?

    It’s Random Wednesday, we had a power cut over the whole of Shetland last night, and I’ve just finished going through the aftermath of that.

    Now that computers have become such an ever-present part of our lives, the very idea of a power cut fills me with hope and pleasure.  Strange, you might say, given that I work in IT and depend on all those computers to keep me in beer and crisps.  But no.  No power equals no computers, no computers equals no problems.  More importantly, at home, no power equals no TV and no internet.  That means we have to – drumroll please… – talk to each other!  And not just the adults!  The kids have to talk as well!

    This power cut took us off for a while overnight.  I was reading in bed at the time (using the Kindle app on my phone, so no power for a while means no eBooks either) so apart from it suddenly being very, very dark, no real problems.  I knew the UPS systems at work would shut everything down gracefully and that we’d have some problems with things not coming back with the power.  But the last power cut…  That was great fun!

    Power went off early evening.  Smallest kids were in bed, eldest 2 watching TV.  The groans of horror that emanated from the lounge as their umbilical connection to Entertainment was severed shook the place to its very foundations.

    “No problems,” said I, “We’ll light some candles and play a game.”

    “Awwww, dad, do we have to!” In stereo.  Dad’s games are, apparently, not known for their fun quotient.

    “It’ll be fun.” (Translation: We’re doing it.  Stop whining or go to bed.)

    So we lit candles in the kitchen, cracked open a Dungeons and Dragons starter set one of them had brought home from Out of School Club because they’d thought I might like it, and started playing.Two hours later, when the power flickered back on, we switched the lights off, unplugged the microwave (irritating flashing clock) and carried on playing until the dragon was well and truly slain.  Much fun was had by all and two new players for Dungeons and Dragons had entered the arena.  The kids were begging for another power cut so we could play some more.  “Why wait?” said I.

    Thus was born our Friday Night Gaming Session.  We’ve battled our way through a couple of adventures using www.trolllord.com‘s Castles and Crusades system (great, old-school gaming. Advanced Dungeons and Dragons feel without all that tedious messing around with THAC0 and other things that I really shouldn’t remember as much about but do).  When we’d finished adventuring, we stepped into the TARDIS and defeated Autons underneath a seaside village locked in a time loop.

    When we wanted to take a break from the roleplaying games, we broke out the playing cards – nothing teaches a kid to add up faster than money being at stake.  Well, I say “money”.  I mean pasta spirals.  That’s our bank in Pontoon, a big box of pasta spirals.  They’re uncooked but that doesn’t stop the more inquisitive players from munching on them.  When Pontoon got old, we moved to dominoes.  When we tired of dominoes, Magic: The Gathering had an outing, Lego games, Carcassonne.  We played as a family.  Fantastic fun all-round.

    Unfortunately, more often than not, we’re back to Simpsons re-runs now.  The television has a more powerful draw than fighting goblins or Daleks in your imagination.  Passive entertainment has trumped active.  So I have a plan.  Last night’s power cut made me realise that if that’s what it takes to get the games played, then the power will be cut.  Specifically to the lights and not the sockets – I hate having to reset all those different clocks.

    Gaming will happen.  And it will happen this Friday.  I haven’t decided yet whether we’re going for Castles and Crusades, Doctor Who or some other game.  Maybe we’ll fight dinosaurs in the Hollow Earth, defeat supervillains whilst maintaining our secret identities, fly X-wing fighters along the trench of a third Death Star that the Rebels have only just found out about.  Who knows?  The only thing I know for certain is that, right now, anything is possible.  And that on Friday night, there’ll be a cry of “Awwwww, dad!  Did you *have* to switch that off?” at 7:15PM.  But that bedtime will come all too soon for them and they’ll be begging for a power cut on Saturday night.

    Mind you, I’ve seen the TV listings for Saturday.  A power cut would be a blessing!