Music For Your Tape Recorder

This year started with a rich mixture of contemporary releases and older hidden gems thanks to "legal downloads", until May or halfway through the list when I was recommended Trademark Ribbons of Gold. I almost didn't listen to anything else for four months until the pace picked up again when I finally purchased GTAIV and Rockstar did once again provide some well playlisted radio stations. Come the end of November I remembered to check for new releases which led to a cascade of new material for consumption. The below playlist is no longer by month as it would be pointless listing one track for each between May and September.

Running Blind Through Killing Fields, Bred To Kill Them All

First Person Shooter, rimblas, 2009

As revealed at the end of my long-simmering rant against Sony, I unexpectedly recently received a PlayStation 3 as a birthday present. The bundled game was Resistance 3. I'm not one for First Person Shooters. I never experienced the revelation of Wolfenstein 3D because it would never work on my old computer; and I never actually bothered to play the second coming of the FPS, Half Life, despite having purchased it. The last shooter to grace my shelf was Rising Sun eight years ago - the poor quality of which (save for a few interesting moments) pretty much killed any enthusiasm I had off the back of the success of Frontline. Only a particular subgenre of the FPS has ever really appealed to me - the tactical shooter.

Last Christmas I Gave You My Heart

Playstation 2 Collection, PseudoGil, 2007

When the PlayStation 2 was launched I had to wait a year before my parents could afford one for my birthday, and even then I had to go without a Christmas present that year because it was that expensive (around £250). Flash forward seven years and the old console had succumbed to drive failure. My parents bought me a replacement slim PS2 which cost only £80. With the release of the PS3 in 2006 I was hoping to follow a few series into the next generation: Grand Theft Auto IV, Metal Gear Solid 4, Gran Turismo 5, et al. As always, the launch price was ridiculously expensive and none of the launch titles interested me, so I waited and saved - every year I put my Christmas tips into my 'PS3 fund' and every year there's a new reason not to buy one.

By last Christmas I made enough to afford one, not due to lack of tips over three seasons, but because the price has barely moved. At the time of writing it appears the cheapest model has finally dropped under £200. I imagine that won't last as Sony will employ the same trick they've been using for five years - halt production, swap out the hard drives for larger ones, restart production and slap the old price tag on them. Given how bloody long it has taken for the price point to decrease, adjusted for half a decade's inflation it probably hasn't at all.

It's in the Trees, It's Coming!

missingno, bencanfield, 2010

Back in the summer I was engaged for several weeks with a role playing game. Though you don't play as any defined character, Gran Turismo has many of the elements of an RPG - just look at the grinding I had to do to afford an Audi R8. This month, however, I've got back into a proper RPG, one of the most popular of all time - Pokémon. Fittingly, I fell ill by the due date for this post as the last time I played Red/Blue was on a sick day which I spent bringing my Pikachu up to Level 100 in Cerulean Cave, which must have been at least twelve years ago. So aside from illness, why have I spent thirteen hours playing a child's old Gameboy adventure this month while on the cusp of turning twenty-five? And why am I also watching the anime?

You Could Feel The Sky

Twentieth Century Fox (suck it, Murdoch)

The past few weeks I've been starting work whilst it's still dark and stood at my window waiting for my lift. The first day I was staring out toward the hills in the distance and a light appeared on the limb and grew brighter and brighter moving right until quickly fading. Whilst I wandered what I had seen, the same phenomenon repeated itself and then I realised I was watching the headlights of cars on the road along the hillside. Similarly, the first time I saw an Iridium satellite in the sky I wanted to believe it was something supernatural, but by actually being educated in my observation I knew it was only a communications dish catching the sun over the horizon. As someone who would like to see evidence of extraterrestrial life or of the paranormal, is it not odd that I've never seen an aerial phenomenon that I was unable to identify? I've got Mulder's I Want To Believe poster on my wall for more than just X-Files fandom. Most UFO reports really are of Venus refracted through swamp gas, because most people can't identify the brightest planet in the sky.

Just the Two of Us

Crushed By The Wheels of Industry (Music Video), Heaven 17, 1982

Last December I hardly wrote anything because the crushing Christmas post meant that I was going to bed early to get up for work early to work till late. It's October and that's already the state of affairs. Only resourceful use of scheduled posts has kept me from being completely silent this month. How is it that one of the better months of the year is resulting in massive overtime payouts, uncompleted walks and undelivered packets? It's not Christmas, it's not snowing... it's "modernisation"!

Some Might Say

Flag of the Getae

Some might say that I have no idea what I want from a conlang. Although this one is in no way genetically related or even similar to previous samples, I still think of them as incarnations of my conlang. That said, I have figured what I want to try out with this one. Last year I said I was trying to out-weird Albanian, so I've gone ahead and made a sister language to Albanian - which, as far as I know, no-one has tried. Most likely because Albanian is poorly and lately attested compared to well documented languages like Latin which has spawned countless Romlangs as a result. On the basis that Albanian is a descendant of Dacian (and that Romanian has a Dacian substrate), I've scraped together what little (free*) information is out there and applied them to yield plausible cognates with Albanian.

*A Concise Historical Grammar of the Albanian Language is currently £154 on Amazon and only partially viewable for free on Google Books.

Seen Enough?

Before the fall when they wrote it on the wall
When there wasn't even any Hollywood
They heard the call
And they wrote it on the wall
For you and me and we understood
-The Caves of Altamira, Steely Dan (1977)

Triplets 14th Street, heather, 2007

No-one is ever paid royalties for Robin Hood and the Monk - the oldest attested ballad of the titular archer. Look at the diverse productions derived from the folk tale of Robin Hood. Where would the modern entertainment industry be without the stories collected by the Brothers Grimm? Such public domain works preceded the shift from cultural to economic capital. The wealth of the developed nations is today largely composed of intangible assets, mainly concepts and ideas and their resultant products, which once known are easily reproducible. This is a problem as our wealth then lies in a naturally infinite source. In this context it's plain to see why copyright terms are continually extended; and if the industry lobbies are correct in their assertions of economic clout, then I can confidently predict that in twenty years a defrosted Cliff Richard and a waxwork Mick Jagger will once again be campaigning for the prolonging of terms for another generation. When these terms exceed the average lifetime they will in effect be infinite. The only ones around to observe the passing of a century-scale 'time limited monopoly' will be perpetual corporations.

Lose Control

Star Wars Collection, Brian Hathcock, 2007

When I was a child in the early 90s, Star Wars seemed to have faded from view. It was actually Muppet Babies that introduced me to it, though I had no idea at the time what it was they were parodying. It wasn't until one of my uncles who grew up with Star Wars got hold of a widescreen VHS of A New Hope that my brother and I were properly presented with the phenomenon. A year or two later the Special Editions were in cinemas and I recall a children's programme looking at the digital insertion of Jabba the Hutt into Episode IV. At the time I thought this was a good thing, bringing it closer to what was intended but couldn't be technologically achieved in 1976. If what we got was a compromised realisation of Lucas' vision then how could we not welcome improvement? But the changes kept coming, and not just the little visual and audio retouches that go unnoticed. Fans of a certain calibre are acutely aware of all the alterations that Lucas has made over the years, and they will certainly be aware of the incongruous modification to Return of the Jedi that will be imposed with the forthcoming Blu-Ray® release.

Great Times in Commotion

9/11 Flipbook, scott_bl8ke, 2011

When I was in Primary 7 we had to spend Wednesday afternoon doing drama. At one point this neatly crossed over with our study of the Second World War - in groups of three we had pretend it was 1939 and we had just heard Neville Chamberlain's declaration of war against Germany. I simply couldn't act as if I was shocked by the start of the war. It meant nothing to me and there was nothing in my own living memory at the age of 11 that came anywhere near that event that I could draw upon. To me, the war was documentaries looking back half a century and old Sunday afternoon films about heroic adventures (it hadn't yet been fully abused and commercialised by first person shooters) which was not the context the people of the real 1939 were living in. That drama class is over half my lifetime ago, so I can't remember what response I acted if any.

Cinnabar / Phthalo Blue

Litmus, magnuscanis, 2009

Just across the river stands the Rosneath transmitter and on clear days the Black Hill transmitter between Glasgow and Edinburgh can be also be discerned. I remember when I first moved into my current house looking out over the river and imagined seeing rolling longwave signals being relayed across the land. That's of course a misconception of how vision works (perpendicular light does not intersect an observer's eye), but it did make me wonder what the world looks like beyond our three-colour perception.

All Important Rubbish Made to Publish Made to Last

It's that time of year again I allow myself to write the worst easiest kind of blog post.

London's Burning With Boredom Now / This is England

London riots, Sean MacEntee, August 2011

London's Burning is an exaggeration, of course, but it seems everyone's invoking The Clash these days. So what's happening on the streets down South? Very likely the same thing that happened in France six years ago. It would be easier just to list the problems that exist: mutual hostility between police and youth, economic disparity, high unemployment, political neglect, racism. In return, at provocation the local adolescents take to the streets, burning everything in sight. Sounds a lot like the death of the social contract, but that's really been the case since the 1970s and the destruction of the post-war compromise.

Phonemes Solo

The Railway Crossing, Fernand Léger, 1919

The Car Analogy works with almost anything. Language is a car that gets your idea from A > B. A great ride makes the journey tolerable (as great prose is effortless to read). Abusing the car will break it, as in deprecating words. Recently the reporting of News of the World's phone hacking has relied on repeating the same key words and phrases constantly. We're told that advertisers and individuals distanced themselves from 'toxic' association with the paper - I heard it so many times I felt agitated as if the word itself was so. We were also told the 'vast majority' of journalists did not employ illegal methods in gathering information. The vast majority of times I've HERD or RED 'vast majority' I've unconsciously deleted the word 'vast'.

A is to B as B is to C

Turquoise Hexagon Monolith, Prij, October 2010

A while back I was accosted by some Jehovah's Witnesses whilst taking a break out on delivery. Once I started talking about causality they dove straight into their bibles for a relevant passage that can be summarised as the old Watchmaker argument. I conceded that the houses around us were indeed built by people, on the grounds that it's quite obvious they were designed and built. We've all seen houses under construction.

Everything Must Go

Testing my CLK-GTR around La Sarthe, Gran Turismo 4

One of the less realistic elements of racing games, particularly ones that brand themselves as simulators, is the short length of races. Two or three laps are common, whilst five or more is a rarity - imagine how long it would take to complete a real F1 season and how quickly the publisher would get sued after someone sits in front of a screen for hours until they have a seizure. These things are necessary limitations, balancing realism, accessible difficulty, and convenience. It's why you can set the length of play in Football games and the reason few racers feature a clutch.

Into The Nineties and Beyond

Around this time eight years ago I was sitting my Higher English exam (first of two tries). For the writing segment you're given a booklet with roughly a dozen topic sentences to pick from. I can't remember what topic led me to write an embarrassing China Syndrome knock-off - in fact I'd like to forget it entirely. I disliked it enough that I put an apology at the end. However, in the preliminary exam a few months before, I wrote an A+ story I really wish I had gotten photocopied - it was probably one of the best things I had then written. The topic I chose in that exam was "Write about a time you went to hospital". When I saw it I immediately thought of the time I broke my arm in primary school, but I realised that the topic did not necessarily mean 'write about a time you were admitted to hospital' allowing me some room for genuine on-the-spot creative writing. Soon after I intended to rewrite it from memory (it was a single page at most) for my old website, but I never got round to it and the following is therefore an extremely loose reconstruction. I also can't remember how it ends.

My Favourite Game

My Mercedes-Benz CLK-GTR 98, Gran Turismo 4

What's that old Douglas Adams quote?

I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

At least Adams' were set by his publisher - mine are all my own making and I was much better at meeting them last year. I was hoping to complete a lot of draft posts this month but I dropped everything to play Gran Turismo 4 for three weeks. I know I'm an instalment behind, but it got neglected in favour of Metal Gear Solid 3 at the time.

There'll Be No Doubt In Your Mind, You'll Believe Everything I'm Saying

X-Files Title Card (Season 1 DVD)

Contemporary events sometimes create a cinematic zeitgeist. After Hale-Bopp passed, Hollywood simultaneously gave us Armageddon and Deep Impact - both films about large objects from space on collision courses with Earth (but only one was any good, which I'll get to at some point). Looking back at the 70s we see a slew of thrillers about political intrigue, paranoia, and conspiracies all borne from the fallout of the Kennedy assassination, Watergate and the involvement of the military-industrial complex in the Vietnam War. Since the 70s, doubting the official line has never been more popular. The X-Files, inspired by those thrillers, prominently tapped into notions of government cover-up concerning UFOs and the existence of alien life. Today doubt knows no bounds, having mostly transformed into full conspiracy theorism. From 9/11 truthers to the birthers who continue to contest the validity of President Obama's nationality, these doubts form more of a dis-belief system than healthy scepticism. And yet in these incredulous times the incredible is accepted so long as it's from an alternative voice.

Play To Win

No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
-Winston Churchill, House of Commons, 1947

When You Walk Through Me

I wanted to see Source Code last week in the cinema but I was ill and I was becoming desperate to avoid spoilers so I viewed it by other means (you know the means I mean). Make note that I will of course pre-order the DVD because I liked the film and wish to ensure more like it get made.

'Inception meets Groundhog Day'. I hate these descriptions that paint everything as a mashup of two existing works. That's not to say that there aren't similarities to other works, which I'll address in the spoiler section, but these comparisons used to market films to preconfigured audiences make little sense under any kind of scrutiny.

Ready Let's Go

Beyond The Infinite, Prij, 2005 

Every year I forget to write something on the anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's flight, and judging by the lack of material here this year was no different!

I remember when I was around nine, and hardly anyone in my class could name the first man on the moon, my dad had told me about the first man to go into space. He and the others that followed him were mortal men and women, but they have and will find themselves amongst the heroes in the sky. I'd rather kids want to be like Yuri Gagarin or Neil Armstrong than one of Simon Cowell's puppets because it's exactly what needs to happen in order to regain the future that should have been already.

One of the earliest releases from the original Human League was a tribute to Gagarin, but also a tribute to the people of the Soviet Union that made it possible. The Dignity of Labour chronicles the miners digging coal to make steel with which engineers construct the launch pad and craft that propel Vostok 1 and its occupant upward into the void.

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Don't Steal Our Sun / The Past Inside The Present

under this clock..., paloetic, 2010

Time and tide wait for no man. A pompous and self-satisfied proverb, and was true for a billion years; but in our day of electric wires and water-ballast we turn it around: Man waits not for time nor tide.
-Mark Twain

For a few years in school I refused to set my watch according to Daylight Savings. The very idea of gaining and losing an hour each year was absurd. Noon is noon - the point of day when the Sun is directly overhead. Of course this is never actually the case in most places even within a perfect time zone system, never mind the absolute mess that passes for a system in practice, but it's accurate enough for common use. If DST irritates me (and it is as I write this at 1am 2am) then you can imagine what I think of the Daylight Savings Bil 2010.

The Times They Are...

The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular, 1995

...a-becoming quite different. One of the advantages of a long running television series is having the time to fully explore and develop the characters. One of the disadvantages of a popular long running television series is that it always passes its peak. Actually, that's a subjective call on my part and that of vocal fans. Objectively, a long running show changes.

The generally agreed point at which The Simpsons faltered lies between Seasons 9 and 10 (roughly 1998). By that measure the show, now in its twenty-second season, has been poorly-written for over half its existence. The common argument against criticism of the latter seasons is that viewers have become overly-familiar with the early episodes through heavy syndication/repeats. As the "bad" now outnumber the golden age ones, that can no longer be true. They can still put out what are good episodes, but they're thin on the ground. The decline must be borne from a change within the writing staff as it is the tone of the episodes that together define the series. In particular, certain writers may not have been familiar with the tone or the show at all.

Music is Math

Broken Record, Auntie P, 2005

Like a broken record [industry], people are constantly portending the death of the album. In an age when every released track is a potential chart entry the album is an obsolete collection of songs.

Originally the album was a collection of physical media containing a lengthy coherent piece. The limited length of a single record necessitated that something like Beethoven's Ninth be split across many records bound together like photographs in a photo album. With increasing storage and a commercial and cultural shift in the post-war era toward self-contained songs, the album came to be a compilation of a group's output.

Ask (GA-Slag FAQ)

Two years ago in the GA-Slag Retrospective I wrote about the genesis and development of said site. In this second background feature I've collected some questions about the GA-Slag, addressed some issues, and provided a little background to events depicted in prominent editions.

Walk Out To Winter

Ecosse C285, Dave Hamster, 2009

See Christmas? Christmas is a bastard.
-Still Game, Cold Turkey (2005 Christmas Special)

It goes without saying that Christmas is an exceptional time of year at Royal Mail. It's fittingly the antipode of summer. Whereas the sunny season is so light that overtime claims are banned, December is a cash bonanza for those willing to take on as much work as possible - morning prep, doing parts of other walks, IVO, RLB, driving lorries, working your day off. If you need the money, so be it. I'm not interested in working myself to death so I only opt in for the early starts, mainly to deal with gone-aways and do the detective work required of the mal-addressed items that people continue to post every year.

There Is A Light That Never Goes Out

Home From Above, NASA (Public Domain), 2010

Looping hypnic orbit looking down. In the twilight I've looked up. Unfathomable distances separating the beacons. Laser light decoheres and planets resolve as less than a smudge. The universe is an explosion in which we exist. Soon we'll be blasted apart beyond horizons. The stelliferous era will be a faint memory as the stars extinguish and galaxies degenerate. DNA strands huddle round an ocean vent for warmth. Somehow the connection is made. We'll leave the cradle, disappearing into eternity. We'll slide through forever. Slide away.

Listen Carefully While I Sing My Comeback Song

Mirrors, Olly Wright, 2006

When all else fails resort to a post about blogging...

When last January rolled around this blog was stagnating. For whatever reason I couldn't write - whether that be writer's block or the limitations of the interface - and resolved to at least post once a month. From all the drafts and notes I decided to work on one of several delayed (seven years) editions for my old website from school. Having spontaneously returned to form, I quickly found myself facing a self-imposed minimum of four posts a month. By June I had completely exhausted the long-standing pool of draft posts and was either resurrecting abandoned posts, republishing old essays, or simply hoping something would come along and inspire me.