Music For Your Tape Recorder

How fitting that in a year when everything I think about seems to be from a decade ago the average year of release for the below is (rounded up) 2002. Once again, though, the tracks are skewed toward the first half of the year as one album has truly dominated since then, thus I've stuck with 2011's format.

A couple of years back I said there was always a drive toward finding new material and never giving something a second chance and an opportunity to grow on me. Three years ago I bought Be Your Own Pet's two albums, but they never really meshed, though Bicycle survived on my iPod all that time until I decided to offer them a make or break chance to sit alongside the other compact discs. Well now they do. Coincidentally the other album I gave a second chance was Wire's 154 which I obtained that same summer three years ago. Perhaps I hadn't been in the right mood at the time.

Road to Nowhere

Nürburgring map, Public Domain, 1964

Way back when Gran Turismo 2 divided its main screen into North, South, East, and West cities I imagined a future instalment of the series in which you drove to each dealership and the home and garage were actual places and not just menus. When Test Drive Unlimited turned up it should have been my dream made real, but the arcade style of racing doesn't appeal to me especially when it assumes the cloak of realism with licensed vehicles. The fact I was playing the crappy PS2 port at the time didn't help. With the RPG elements present in GT5 it seems like the premier PlayStation racing game missed the boat there, which cannot be true since Polyphony Digital never gets anything wrong. Cue statement contradicting this.

Possibly more annoying than failed shifts stranding you in neutral is GT5's course maker. As with the FIFA series and Subbuteo, some lay the virtual demise of Scalectrix at the likes of the Formula One series and GT. One of the great things about Scalectrix was the freedom to create whatever track layout you wanted - limited by space and budget, of course. I had always wanted to create a bridge span across the stairs of my old bedroom but couldn't given the amount of pocket money I'd have to blow on extra track pieces (the exact same reason I couldn't expand my Lego train set). So you'd think GT5, free of such limitations, could provide an actual course maker and not a random corner generator.

Panic (Hang the DJ)

But the waters... receded

Sextant (NOAA), Public Domain

Predictions of the end-times are likely as old as creation myths as likely as old as history itself. The invention of cinema enabled the depiction of the ultimate dramatic scenario and so it began. The disaster movie as a genre emerged in the seventies (Towering Inferno, et al) as classically narrative compared to their modern antecedents - almost all stories are of characters facing an obstacle they must overcome; in the above case a fire in a skyscraper. They boasted highly popular actors in the lead roles which, like any other film of the era, drew audiences. After Jurassic Park demonstrated the sky was the limit with computer generated imagery the floodgates opened (a metaphor that could actually make an interesting post-modern disaster film about the effect of CGI on film-making). Now there was nothing that could not be depicted. A lot of the modern disaster films since the mid 90s can be attributed to one Roland Emmerich and his little known 1996 film Independence Day. Inevitably someone will chime in with the old adage about how any critique of 'low-brow' movies is a comment on how the critic cannot turn their brain off and just enjoy it. I enjoy Independence Day and I happen to own The Day After Tomorrow (which I last watched on October 30th) despite its ludicrous implausibility. I even have a Steven Seagal movie (Under Siege 2) amongst a home video collection that includes a number of foreign language films, but the film 2012 (dir. Roland Emmerich) is just bad. Not enjoyably bad... and you already know why I'd bring that up three years after release.

Pedal Fury

Clutch disc, Public Domain

As I said in November, I've spent 14 years playing the Gran Turismo series. And as I said in July 2011, for the sake of simplicity most racing games ignore the existence of clutches. Well now let the two combine, for I have spent the last five days getting to grips with the Logitech G27 racing wheel.

One of the reasons for getting a wheel (aside from further immersion) is that for a few months now I've been watching Valdudes' Gran Turismo videos on YouTube and Twitch and secretly coveting a place in a subscriber race (which also explains my venturing into the open lobby). One of the near requirements is a racing wheel, simply due to the greater control over one's virtual vehicle - which is a kind of shibboleth for competent participants. In my own opinion I've mastered the art of driving with the controller. Aside from the joypad being too crude to recover from the majority tailspins, the right analogue stick offers a close approximation of the pedals - I can quite easily feed the accelerator on exits in the absence of traction control (TCS) and graduate the brakes on entry in the absence of anti-lock brakes (ABS). Some people are unbelievably still using the □ and ╳ buttons, and with all the assists turned on the kiddies must think GT is bloody Mario Kart. If you're going to let the computer do everything for you then you might as well play the game in B-Spec mode.

Where Does Time Go?

Part Two of Two.

A Wistful Look, James Carroll Beckwith

He's supposed to be old, like 26.
-The Brain, Brick (2005)

Yes, I did wait a year to use that quote. The previous post tangentially touched on my own pessimistic suspicion that I have missed the metaphorical bus. Like the time I decided to take a real bus home from work four years ago on a torrential day before Christmas - I waited in the rain for twenty minutes (not that it mattered since I had already been in it for four hours at this point) and not a single bus appeared. I was therefore prepared for two to appear at once. It turned out they were cancelled due to the flooding. At other times I instead feel there's enough time to just catch the last one. And yet whenever I take a few moments to just lie in bed and think I glance at the clock to find time is flying and I have somewhere to be - it hardly ever seems to do that illusion where it holds onto a second, but then is there really anything meaningful you could do in a second that would wipe out any death-bed regrets you might have?

While We Miss Chances You Can Almost Hear Time Slipping Away

Part One of Two.

Self portrait, Princess Victoria of Kent, 1835

One September morning eleven years ago David Angell boarded a plane that would lead to his death. On the very same day, due to a sequence of fortuitous mistakes, Seth McFarlane missed the very same flight and Mark Wahlberg cancelled his tickets for that flight at short notice. In another universe where the chain of cause and effect was subtly different; all of them died, or none of them died, or some who died did not and vice versa. When you raise the stakes, the fridge horror of the Many Worlds Interpretation becomes apparent.

Most of us have never dodged a bullet of that calibre, though I don't think it would be unreasonable to say most people have experience of almost being run-over. Not quite the kind of traumatic event that drives a person to madness thinking of all the variables that could have fallen in place and sealed their fate, but with the multiverse theory in mind it becomes apparent that for every recognisable counterpart of yourself that survives a close-call there may be just as many that did not. And now empathically, or perhaps egotistically, your imagination now places you in your other's shoes. For all that you stood outside the path of oblivion you condemned another you to the fate you are so relieved to have been spared.

High School Musical 1 (GA-Slag Finale)

According to the education department, none of what you are about to see... ever happened...

ˍMOIRITAˍ

Starring:
Moira as Rektor Eva McColl
Prij as Che
John McIndöe as Juan Perm-ón
Mr McDougall as Andrea Corr as Perm-ón's Mistress
 Stewart Dent as Class of 2011 Battle Royale Winner
Alan Menzies as Obersturmbannlehrer ab Historie

June 24th 2011
In the Waterfront Cinema the latest movie freezes and the lights come up. The manager enters and speaks to the audience:
"It is my sad duty to inform you that Eva McColl, principal of the school, entered unemployment at 3PM this afternoon."
The crowd erupts in distraught commotion. Amidst this circus our focus falls on straight-faced Che. Oh what a circus...

Ask (GA-Slag FAQ 2)

Prijatelj, Rubberducky, Artemis, Llena, Altavoz

It's hard to imagine things would move on so far that the GA-Slag became part of a different decade. At the time we really were living in the present. By sixth year most of Les Enfants Terribles was in the don't-know-what-we'll-do-after-school class while the majority of the year were in the university application classes. We spent most of that class having a laugh; regularly at the teacher's expense, though she would say at our own expense. It is what it is, and this is the tenth anniversary of the night I was bored and got a freeware FTP application to work and uploaded the familiar black and red image of James Dean Bradfield from the NME. The first rant pre-dates that by almost a full month, but at the time it was being hosted on Stephen's GA-Master site, and so this is really the point at which I took the idea and ran with it. Let's take some questions from the audience...