#oneaday Day 559: You Can’t Go Back

What’s done is done. However much you might want to turn back time and do things again, the oft-requested Quicksave feature for Life has never made an appearance in several million years of patches, so I’m pretty much sure that we’re stuck with our broken save system with permadeath.

In seriousness, though, a bit of nostalgia-tripping through some old podcasts that some friends and I used to make (long before the Squadron of Shame got all podcasty) reminds me that time has indeed passed — and quite a bit of it. Certain people are no longer in my life. Certain people have shifted to the peripheries of my life. Many of the things I used to do are distant memories. And, of course, I’m no longer 26 years old, as my girlfriend Andie is so keen to point out. (She’s going to be on the receiving end of plenty of revenge when she turns 30. Oh yes indeed.)

This sense of change is made all the more prominent in the digital age, given that it’s entirely possible to leave a trail of digital detritus across the entire Internet. Some of it gets lost, but some of it remains here and there as evidence of things that are constant and things that aren’t.

The aforementioned Gaming with Pedwood podcast MySpace page, for example, is still there, as is, for that matter, my page. (Buggered if I can remember the login details for either of them, though.)

A short-lived attempt at blogging the life of a teacher is also still present and correct, a follow-up to a series of emails I sent during my PGCE. I thought I wrote more than that, but as you can see, it tails off pretty quickly as I discovered that the life of a teacher, particularly in a dodgy chav-infested rathole that was £500k in the red was, in fact, rather stressful, and I thought it would be perhaps unwise to chronicle all that in a totally honest manner at the time.

And my 1up.com page is still up and running, featuring possibly some of my earliest attempts at games-related blogging.

Sadly, a couple of sites are nowhere to be seen. You can get at the Angry Jedi site as far back as 2003 via the Wayback Machine but sadly some of the links and pictures are broken, meaning that some of the MP3 files we created are gone forever. The site I put together for the University of Southampton Theatre Group can also be found via the Wayback Machine — including the very early example of blogging that I did using a Palm Tungsten, a 32MB SD card, a card reader and an Internet café. High tech!

The site that I’m pretty sure I had at petedavison.com — my first experience with WordPress, no less — is nowhere to be seen, unfortunately. And the site I constructed at university, known as Studio A33 (after my first year flat) which distributed the various dodgy Klik and Play games my friends and I created, is also conspicuously absent. This is a great shame, as I had a tremendous urge to play Hobbit Blasters recently. I’m sure it’s lurking on a CD somewhere in the garage.

Life moves on at a rate far too rapid for our liking sometimes. It’s pleasing to come across such fragments of our digital lives from time to time, as it reminds us of where we’ve come from, both good and bad places. But we can’t go back — however hard you might want to try and recapture the feelings you describe in these digital fragments, you need to accept that it ain’t ever going to happen.

#oneaday Day 558: Poo

Andie reckoned I wouldn’t write a blog post about poo. So here I am proving her wrong.

The word “poo” is one of those ones that never fails to make me smile in a childish manner. It’s not a scientific word in the slightest, and it’s right up there with “wee” in the childish stakes — only, for whatever reason, talking about poo tends to be more of a taboo than talking about wee. I’m not sure why this is — but it just is.

Americans, in my experience, tend to use the word “poop” more than “poo”. I recall an episode of Friends where the word “poo” came up quite a bit and it just sounded odd coming out of Matthew Perry’s mouth. The word “poo”, not actual poo.

The act of pooing is, of course, both unpleasant for others to witness and immensely satisfying for the person doing it. As a gross generalisation (in every sense of the word “gross”) gentlemen appear to enjoy a good poo rather more than the ladies, though there are, of course, exceptions. For the most part, though, gentlemen are certainly more prone to spending a great deal more time pooing than the ladies.

There are doubtless a variety of reasons for this, possibly the fact that being alone in the bathroom with your pants around your ankles is one of the only times that you’re truly alone and can sit there with your thoughts. It’s probably not a coincidence that Rodin’s famous statue The Thinker is sat in a distinctly pooing-like position. After all, what better time is there to get all the shit (no pun intended) together in your head than a time when you really can’t be disturbed by other people? Exactly. Best to enter the bathroom with your thoughts for company.

Or, indeed, an iPhone and a copy of Bejeweled Blitz.

I sometimes wonder if iPhone game designers did their playtesting on the toilet, because the very best iPhone games are friendly to toilet-play sessions. Bejeweled Blitz, for example, takes place in one minute chunks, if you’ll pardon the expression. A level of Angry Birds takes probably less than a minute to get through. And titles like 100 Rogues are easy to stop at any time when you, you know, stop.

So let’s praise the act of pooing. Without it, it’s entirely possible many of the great inventions of our time wouldn’t have come to be. Life’s great thinkers doubtless came up with their various theories of life, the universe and everything while pinching off a loaf. And surely many’s the author struck with a wave of inspiration while dropping the kids off at the pool.

Pooing, then: don’t be ashamed. Be proud of your poos and what you accomplish during them, even if it’s just another ridiculous high score in Bejeweled Blitz. Because seriously, the alternative is just staring at a blank wall, which is just no fun at all.

Poo!

(Enough.)

#oneaday Day 557: Play Some Music

I’ve been playing Groove Coaster on my iPhone. If you haven’t already downloaded it, stop reading this right now and go and download it while it’s still 99 cents/69p.

So now you’ve played it. So you understand.

Groove Coaster is pleasing for a number of reasons, not least of which is the fact that it’s a gorgeous-looking, solidly-playing game with plenty of content for the miniscule amount of money you pay for it. The Infinity Gene-style visuals complement the gameplay well, being attractive without distracting, and they look beautifully pin-sharp on the Retina display of the iPhone 4.

That’s not the best thing about Groove Coaster, though. No; the best thing about it by far is how it calls to mind the days when music games were home to a huge amount of creativity. We had virtual turntables (BeatMania), a rapping dog (Parappa the Rapper), a guitar-toting sheep that really didn’t look like a sheep (UmJammer Lammy), a rabbit that liked prancing around on wiggly lines (Vib Ribbon) and weird things that liked racing down tunnels (Frequency/Amplitude).

These days, though, what do we have? Guitar Hero and Rock Band, and it’s questionable whether or not we really have Guitar Hero still. Okay, we have DJ Hero too, but for the most part, it’s all about the plastic instruments.

Groove Coaster casts the mind back to a time before Guitar Hero, when music games were about the music, not about the things you had in your hands while you were playing (not your penis, you filthy pervert. You know your mind was going there.) No; Groove Coaster is about losing yourself in an enormously diverse array of clearly Japanese music tracks and letting your finger do all the work. Success is down to how well you engage with the music, and how well you can equate the on-screen figures (which twist and turn rather than following the linear path of Guitar Hero and Rock Band) with the way the music is going. You can’t play it passively — it’s a game you need to concentrate on. It’s not about “party play” — no bad thing in itself, I might add — but it’s about getting inside the music and “feeling” it in a way I haven’t experienced since Frequency and Amplitude.

The other great thing is the characteristically Japanese music makes me think of Namco’s PS1 games — Ridge Racer Type 4 and Anna Kournikova’s Smash Court Tennis specifically. These games had fantastic non-licensed music that was obviously Japanese but had enough Western-style “funk” about it to appeal to a universal audience. There are several tracks in Groove Coaster that would certainly not have been out of place in a Namco title from the late 90s. This, as they say, is a Good Thing.

I don’t even mind the fact that the game gratuitously sells “boost” items and extra tracks for actual money, because 1) I paid so little for the game in the first place, 2) there’s plenty of content in there without buying anything extra and 3) the “boost” items don’t necessarily give you a massive advantage, they’re just a bit more convenient.

So, then, if you ignored my first paragraph and still haven’t downloaded Groove Coaster I say again: go get it now. (If you want to. Please don’t hit me. What are you doing with that shov–)

#oneaday Day 556: One Direction, Unless It’s That One

I have an uncanny sense of direction. I’m quite pleased that I’ve developed this over the years, because it’s an incredibly useful thing to have. It gives me confidence when going to a new place because I know that I can 1) generally find my way around pretty quickly and 2) won’t panic if I do happen to get lost. In fact, when visiting a new place, I tend to find getting lost is actually a good thing because it forces you to find your way around, spot landmarks and, occasionally, yell at your navigator. (I’ve never yelled at my navigator. Largely because my navigator is usually Google Maps, which doesn’t respond well — or indeed at all — to constructive criticism)

I’m not entirely sure where this special ability has come from, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s something to do with video games — particularly, in my formative years, old-school first person shooters and more recently, open-world sandbox games like Grand Theft Auto.

Modern first-person shooters wouldn’t help, of course, being mostly linear in nature. If you want to get a good feeling of being lost and having to learn an environment, go play Doom or Duke Nukem 3D and marvel at how useless their 2D maps for 3D-ish environments. If you really want to get lost, have a go at Wolfenstein 3D or Catacomb Abyss, where all the textures fit on a single 1.44MB floppy disk.

The more I think about this, the more I feel it’s probably where it came from. If I think of Bully, which I played through recently, I’d happily be able to navigate you around the map without having to refer to, well, the map. Want to go to the carnival? Sure. (Leave the school, turn left, go over the bridge, follow the seafront and go through the tunnel.) Looking for the town hall? Got you covered. (Leave the school, turn right, go over the bridge then keep going straight ahead until the end of the street.) Want to find your way to the mental asylum? No problem! (Leave the school, turn right, over the bridge, turn immediately right, go under the underpass, follow the road around as it bends left, then right, then right again, then around the end of the building, over the bridge, through the docks to the end and through the tunnel.)

The best thing about having a good sense of direction is not having to be a slave to satnav. When driving at night these days, pretty much every car cockpit you see seems to be lit up with some kind of satnav device. I actually very rarely use satnav, despite having a good app on my phone for it (CoPilot Live — cheap and has a sexy voice) and tend to use Google Maps if I need to see where I am.

So, then, if you need someone to guide you home after a big night out? I’m your man. You can drop me down in the middle of an unfamiliar city in the middle of the night (possibly drunk) and I’ll get you home. Eventually. And there may be a stop for a kebab on the way. But I’ll get you home.

#oneaday Day 555: Social Smarts

This story in the New York Times tells of a year-old startup company called Social Intelligence, whose remit consists of assembling a dossier of information on job applicants based on their online activity over the past seven years.

Now, you may argue that employers are perfectly within their rights to carry out background checks on prospective employees, and you’d be absolutely right — it’s why schools and other positions which place people in positions where they will be dealing with “vulnerable” individuals require a disclosure check to make sure the applicant doesn’t have a checkered criminal past. Evidence of professional honours and charitable work also helps make an employer feel that not everything listed on a CV is a fabrication.

The concerning part is what else Social Intelligence looks for — according to the NYT article, “online evidence of racist remarks; references to drugs; sexually explicit photos, text messages or videos; flagrant displays of weapons or bombs and clearly identifiable violent activity.” The concerning part is not the type of content that the company is looking for — it’s how it might be stumbled across in a typical Internet search. That is, completely lacking in context. I’m not for a moment condoning violent activity, racism or anything else dodgy. But, frankly, everyone makes jokes, and sometimes those jokes are off-colour. Everyone has embarrassing Facebook photos, many of which are not what they seem. And if someone’s had a puff of weed of a weekend and had a good giggle about it with their friends, that doesn’t make them an inherently bad person, either.

“We are not detectives,” said Max Drucker, CEO of the company. “All we assemble is what is publicly available on the Internet today.”

Fair enough; but where does it stop? Once employers get the message that it’s okay for companies like Social Intelligence to start trawling through your online background, what’s to stop them from rejecting you based simply on something you said to your friends, or who you associate with online. This is particularly relevant given the “amusing” practice of friends “facejacking” or “fraping” each other’s accounts given the opportunity — perhaps they left their account logged in, perhaps they left their phone on the table to go for a piss. Regardless of how or why it happened, a good-natured facejacking with all its usual excesses could well lead to someone’s job prospects being dashed on the rocks — through no fault of the candidate.

Then there’s the privacy question. Not necessarily the “what you share” question — that’s a different matter entirely, and one which every individual must decide upon: what are you willing to tell people online? No, the privacy question I’m concerned about here is the divide between the personal and the professional. We’re all different people at work — we behave in one way when we’re on the clock, expected to be that person listed in the Person Specification and deal with customers and clients in the way we’re supposed to, but as soon as 5pm rolls around we’re off down the pub, swearing like a sailor, giving each other light-hearted ribbings and possibly making fools of ourselves. This latter part of the day doesn’t affect our capability to do the job effectively. This latter part of the day is completely irrelevant to an employer — and, given most social networks’ focus on the “personal” rather than the “professional”, most social networks save the interminably boring LinkedIn are also completely irrelevant to an employer.

As someone who suffered workplace bullying from management partly as a result of some extremely vague negative comments on Twitter (which didn’t mention the company in question at all, I hasten to add) — and witnessed several colleagues get fired over a Facebook prank that went awry — I feel particularly strongly about this. The things I said online were vague, not directed at my employer but at my life situation in general, and designed to let my friends who cared about me know how I was feeling — which wasn’t great at the time. My professional life had no place intruding on my personal life — my personal life was not affecting my job performance, which had never been better. There were facts and figures and customer satisfaction surveys to prove it. Ironically, all the poor treatment I received at the hands of this shockingly bad management did was make me more likely to badmouth them now that I’ve left the company. But specifics of that are for another day.

The best analogy I can think of for Social Intelligence’s work would be if as part of your job interview you had someone from the company follow you to the pub in the evening, follow you home, watch you go about your daily business, watch you have a shit, shower, shave, and then go through your bins just for good measure. In the days before social networking sites employers didn’t do this, so just because there is the possibility for unprecedented invasions of privacy doesn’t mean that it should happen.

Sadly, however, in the modern world, a lot of people seem to think that the words can and should are, in fact, interchangeable. And as such we end up with companies such as Social Intelligence rifling through candidates’ virtual dirty laundry in an attempt to come up with the one tragic flaw that means Mr Perfect is not, in fact, quite so perfect for this position after all.

To me, the concept of “watch what you say” goes against everything social media — which should, in essence, be the ultimate form of free speech — stands for. But while this sort of thing is going on, you’d better just double-check those privacy settings, and cancel that account on that swinging site you signed up for “just to take a look.”

#oneaday Day 554: Telephobia

If you phone me, it’s entirely possible that I won’t want to talk to you. I might not even answer. I’m not being a dick, and I still like you, I just hate talking on the phone.

Actually, it goes deeper than that. I am fucking petrified of talking on the phone.

Here’s what happens when I receive a phone call:

Phone rings.

“Shit! My phone’s ringing,” I think. “I wish my ringtone wasn’t so loud/embarrassing.”

I mute the ringtone and look at the display to see who’s calling.

“I don’t want to answer that if I don’t know who it is,” I think if I see a blocked number. “They must have bad news for me or want to yell at me; I must have done something wrong,” I think if I see a number for someone I recognise.

“But wait,” I then think. “Wasn’t there that thing I was hoping to hear back from? Maybe it’s that.”

“Oh, but what the hell will I say?” the irrational side of my mind says. “You have enough trouble dealing with people in person at times, you can’t fill awkward silences on the phone with hand gestures or pretending to cough or something.”

“Just do it,” says the rational side of my head. “What, seriously, is the worst possible thing that could happen?”

“I don’t want anyone to listen to me on the phone,” chimes in the irrational side of my head. “But if you must, answer it.” I disappear into a room (or outside if a convenient room isn’t available), close the door so no-one can listen in and take a deep breath, preparing to take the call.

Unfortunately, by this time, my voicemail has usually taken over and a whole new set of anxieties take the place of the original fears. I see a voicemail message come in and I’m hesitant to listen to it just in case it’s someone, again, yelling at me. I don’t generally give people reasons to yell at me, but still the natural assumption for me when I receive a voicemail is that it’s someone yelling at me, particularly if I’ve had something important to do recently and I’m paranoid that I may have forgotten to do any or all of it.

It’s no better when I have a phone call to make. Here’s how that goes:

Look at phone number written down.

Look at phone.

Rehearse start of conversation in head, or at least attempt to.

Wonder what might happen if person on other end of phone deviates from script in my head.

Panic a bit.

Look at phone number again.

Rehearse alternative start of conversation in head. Wonder what the other possibilities might be.

Stare at phone for a bit.

Pick up phone. Start to dial number.

Stop.

Wait.

Think a bit more.

Swallow heavily.

Put down phone. Go and do something less stressful, like giving haircuts with a chainsaw.

(As an aside, oddly enough I seem to be just fine with “professional” phone calls. It’s the more “personal” calls that I have difficulty dealing with. I worry that the person on the other end will judge me, misunderstand my long silences or call me a twat.)

I hate this part of myself. It’s a genuine phobia, irrational and all, and a bit of casual Internet research suggests that I’m not the only person who feels this way, not by a long shot. It even has a proper name — telephobia (or, depending on who you talk to, the tongue-twisting telephonophobia or simply “telephone phobia”) — but that doesn’t really make me feel much better about it.

The solution to it is, as suggested by several people, to deliberately put myself into situations where I have to make phone calls. I’ve done temp work that would have involved answering the phone. I couldn’t do it. I froze up, petrified, whenever the phone rang. I had to speak to my temporary boss almost in tears telling her that I just couldn’t answer the phone. Deliberately put myself in that situation again? Sadly, it might work — but I just don’t feel up to it, yet.

The phone is a pain in the arse. Even if I actually liked talking on it, I’d likely still think it was a pain in the arse. It’s obtrusive, it interrupts things, you can’t do anything else while you’re talking on the phone (unless you have one of those Bluetooth headsets, and then you just look like a tit, plus people can then hear you pissing/making a sandwich/walking around outside/watching TV) and it’s impossible to end a conversation effectively.

This hatred is, I know, all part of the “irrational” part of the phobia and I’m sure that if I was able to cope with it, I’d probably, in fact, actually quite like talking to people on the phone. But while a phone ringing and the prospect of having to answer it completely terrifies me and fills me with a sense of panic and dread… no thanks. I’ll stick to forms of communication I’m actually comfortable with and can take my time over, thanks.

For now, anyway.

#oneaday Day 553: Classic Post

You know what annoys me? Apart from chavs; people who use too many exclamation marks; people who forget to put question marks on the end of emails and then send a whole new email saying just “??”; inappropriate use of the tongueface smiley when there’s really nothing worth sticking your tongue out over; onions; Facebook; getting an itch on the part of your back you can’t reach; terrorism; Michael Pachter; cameraphones at concerts; and computer hardware failing, of course?

The word “classic”.

Now, there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the word “classic” when used correctly. Dracula is a classic novel. Monty Python is classic comedy. Judas Priest’s Painkiller is a classic metal album. Super Mario World is a classic video game.

Brita water filter cartridges are not, in any way, nor will they ever be, “classics”. Similarly, anything coated in chocolate may be tasty but likewise will not, and never will be, a “classic” flavour. Running OS 9 apps on old OS X machines using the Classic interface does not make me think “Gosh, I wish using a computer was still like this.” And my bank account is never going to go down as a work of great literature or indeed an influential work of economics, despite my bank’s assertion that it is a “classic” account.

I’m not sure where this stupid trend came from but it completely destroys the meaning of the word. This isn’t the first word that modern society has mangled and violated, of course — see also “awesome” (which I confess I’m guilty of using, largely because I talk to a lot of Americans and partly because I used to work for Apple — the two things essentially being one and the same in terms of daily communications and what it does to your typical vocabulary), “epic”, “fail” and doubtless numerous others.

But “Classic”? Seriously? I doubt in twenty years’ time people are going to be looking back at the cartridges Brita water filters used and thinking “yes, that really was a classic of early 21st century water filtering design, but my, how primitive it looks now!” Or maybe they will. Perhaps early 21st century domestic engineering will become something of an art form in the near future, when we all have robot servants who will eventually and inevitably rise up against us but in the meantime get exploited by us lazy bastards.

Wait, I seem to have stretched my brain across the fourth dimension. Let me bring it back to the present.

Yeah, you think I’m taking the piss with the water filter thing, don’t you? Well suck on this:

“Classic” water filter my arse. This, of course, being branded as a “classic” water filter cartridge now implies that there’s some sort of edgy contemporary water filter out there which probably hangs around on street corners smoking marijuana and tagging walls with cans of spraypaint. A water filter so edgy and contemporary that it doesn’t filter your water at all, it just spits it back in your face and tells you to go fuck yourself because this is 2011 and, like, dude, there are people out there who have no water at all and you’re worried about sucking back a bit of limescale?

I may have overthought this somewhat and indeed deviated slightly from my original topic. I think on that note it may be time to go and lie down for a little while. Good night!

#oneaday Day 552: My Favourite Bastard: Gary Smith

I mentioned a few days ago that I’ve been playing Bully again. I have now beaten it again (with 100% completion, more fool me) and have come to the conclusion that the game’s primary antagonist, Gary Smith, is one of the finest villains we’ve seen in gaming.

(Bully spoilarz ahead.)

Gary is every teacher’s worst nightmare. He’s brash, outspoken, manipulative and has ADD. At the outset of the game, it’s clear that he’s a bully, judging by the way he treats Pete Kowalski. Pete doesn’t stand up to Gary, though, as it’s clear that he’s afraid of him and, judging by his behaviour towards Jimmy later in the game, prefers to live for the approval of others.

Algie, one of the Nerds clique, refers to Gary as a “sociopath”. This is probably an accurate description — as time goes on and Gary becomes increasingly paranoid, thanks in part to him ceasing to take his ADD meds, he manipulates the schoolkids to his own ends without a hint of remorse. He lies and cheats and takes every chance he can get to get one up on Jimmy. Jimmy, being a pretty tough “water off a duck’s back” sort of kid, takes all this in his stride and eventually manages to convince the cliques of the school that Gary is, in fact, a douchebag and that Jimmy did not, in fact, do or say any of the things that Gary led them to believe. The early part of the game largely consists of dealing with the aftermath of the various messes Gary creates — messes which we never see him create, but certainly see the consequences of.

All goes well until Jimmy gets overconfident with his new-found fame and power and half-successfully pulls off his biggest prank yet: to tag Bullworth City Hall with the slogan “Bullworthless”. He has an audience while he does so, but it looks like he’s gotten away with it, until he gets back to school. Gary has informed the Principal of Jimmy’s misdemeanour, Jimmy gets expelled and Gary becomes Head Boy of the school — a position he had coveted since well before Jimmy ever arrived.

With his new power, Gary turns all the cliques against each other — and Jimmy — with the help of the Townie school dropouts, and he sparks off a full-scale riot in the school. The teachers are powerless to do anything about this, with most of them being too embroiled in their own matters anyway — particularly Ms. Phillips and Mr. Galloway’s attempts to throw off Mr. Hattrick and his crusade against Galloway’s alcoholism. Taking advantage of the chaos, Gary takes Principal Crabblesnitch hostage and lures Jimmy to the roof of the school for a final showdown.

Jimmy, being Jimmy, takes down Gary, the pair of them crashing through the roof of Crabblesnitch’s office just as Gary proudly proclaims that his masterplan has come to fruition. Crabblesnitch hears this — despite having been tied up by Gary, he’s too under his spell to believe him capable of any wrongdoing until he hears Gary confess to his crimes. Gary ends up expelled and we never hear of him again, save for a few rumours that he’s living in the school belltower, and others that he’s living with the Townies.

The best thing about Gary as a villain is not his manipulative nature — though the constant frustration that Jimmy feels as clique after clique turns against him time and time again is enough to make you hate the little bastard. No; the very best thing about Gary as a villain is that he’s just not there. Gary is off-screen for a good 90% of the game and all you, as Jimmy, have to go on is second-hand accounts and “he said, she said” rumours — just like real high school. Because if there’s one thing a thousand crap teen coming of age movies have showed us: there’s nothing worse than being misrepresented to the whole school.

It’s Gary’s long absence that makes kicking the snot out of the little git at the end of the game all the more satisfying. While the whole thing is perhaps a little silly, and Gary’s motivations are never quite clear, it’s immensely pleasing to finally get one up on him.

Perhaps the fact that Gary’s motivations for “wanting to take over the school” are somewhat obscured is deliberate, though; we see frequent evidence throughout the game that Gary is at the very least a sociopath and at worst a dangerous psychopath. He’s a narcissist and a megalomaniac, and he doesn’t care about anyone but himself — he wants to make his way to the top by fair means or foul, and doesn’t care how many toes, testicles and faces he treads on to get there. Jimmy finds himself in danger of becoming Gary when he initially manages to get all the cliques to respect him and each other and becomes overconfident and cocksure as a result — but discovers when Gary turns them all against him and each other that he’s got too much respect for other people and the community, however dysfunctional, of Bullworth Academy, to continue treating people as his puppets, his playthings. It’s for this reason that Jimmy eventually prevails and takes his rightful position as head of the school — this time, without becoming a dick about it, despite his propensity to solve problems through punching them in the face.

So, then, Gary Smith: I salute you. You were a worthy adversary and deserve to take your place alongside the great gaming villains of our time.

#oneaday Day 551: Feel What You Feel

It’s been a couple of days of bad news, what with the horrible attacks in Norway and today’s sad but unsurprising news that Amy Winehouse’s somewhat tentative grip on life has finally given out.

Online and broadcast discussion of these matters has been interesting to observe. The media has been all over both of them, as you might expect. The reporting of Winehouse’s death was a bit obnoxious, to be honest, with a constant live stream of the view of her street, presumably hoping to see something — anything — newsworthy. In the time I watched, there was nothing newsworthy besides the fact that she had died. The BBC strung this out with a series of quotes from a bizarre selection of people, including the ex-prime minster Gordon Brown’s wife.

A lot of Twitter got all indignant earlier on at people expressing sadness over Winehouse’s death while considerably more people had died in Norway. Then people got indignant about people’s indignance, saying that it’s OK to feel things about both pieces of news. Then people got indignant about this, saying that there are people starving in the world, etc. etc. It could have continued indefinitely — I haven’t really looked since earlier, but there was severe risk of an infinite loop of indignance going on.

I kind of agree with the second group. As the version of Stalin in Command & Conquer: Red Alert said, “when one man dies, it is a tragedy; when one million die, it is a statistic” (Aside: according to Wikiquotes, this is commonly misattributed to Stalin. I did not know that. TIL.). That may be a harsh way of putting it, but there’s a sort of logic to it; when we hear about the death toll in Norway, it’s horrifying, but difficult to picture all the individual faces if you didn’t know anyone affected personally. Contrast that with Amy Winehouse, whose face everyone knows, and it’s easy to see why some people might take that a bit more “personally” despite not knowing her themselves — it’s more relatable and, in some ways, easier to deal with.

However, that doesn’t mean that it’s a case of all or nothing, one or the other. You can feel bad about both things. You can feel bad about those things and the starving children in the world, too, if you like. Or, if you’re going through a difficult time in your own life, you can feel free to say “fuck it” to all that and be selfish, too. There’s no shame in your own individual feelings, particularly in this media- and Internet-saturated world where it often feels like the things we’re supposed to feel about a “tragedy” are prescribed to us, and anyone who doesn’t conform is not being appropriately sympathetic or empathetic.

I say feel whatever you want to feel. If you knew someone in Norway who was killed in the attacks, mourn them. If you knew Amy Winehouse, mourn her. If you didn’t know anyone involved directly, feel bad for the people who were affected if you want to, but don’t feel guilty if the things that are happening to you feel like they’re taking priority. The relative severity of incidents gets proportionally amplified the closer they are to you — so something relatively “minor” in the grand scheme of things may seem like the most important thing in the world to you, even with all these other things going on. And that’s OK.

The reason I say this is because of the way I spent a lot of last year feeling. Grief is a terrible thing and sometimes it feels like it will never end, but the worst thing I feel you can do while you’re grief-stricken is feel guilty about it.

So feel what you feel without guilt. It’s your business, and no-one else’s.

#oneaday Day 550: How to Play Pocket Academy

After posting a lengthy comment on yesterday’s post, I figured that I’d share what I’ve discovered about playing Kairosoft’s Pocket Academy with a view to potentially making the start of the game a little easier for those of you who haven’t tried it yet. So here we go.

The First Few Months

You’ll start your new school with a few basic facilities, one teacher and a couple of students, one of whom you design and name yourself. Don’t be tempted to build facilities or level up your teacher to begin with, even if they come to you and very politely inform you that their friends get more training than they do. The reason for this is that facilities cost money each month for upkeep, and each level up for a teacher raises their salary by 20%.

Instead, your initial activities should focus around getting your students’ abilities up to snuff through special classes, and performing Challenges to raise tuition.

Special classes cost one of the three types of Research Points to perform, and each will raise students’ grades in one or two subjects. As you progress through the game, more classes (and more effective classes) will become available. To acquire Research Points, it’s just a case of waiting — they come either from teachers using facilities (tap on a facility to see which type of points it provides), from students talking to each other (randomly determined) or special events such as those which occur in the summer and the fall (each event is tied to a particular type of Research Points).

Challenges cost money to take on, but succeeding in them increases your tuition by $20-30 per student. You can perform up to two successful Challenges per month. Failing one doesn’t count as one of these two — and in fact, failing a challenge provides you with Research Points, so if you have an excess of cash, this can be a good way of quickly bumping up your stocks. Passing a Challenge is determined partly by random chance, partly by the participating student’s Intelligence and Attitude stats, and partly by their grades. Raise grades with special classes and keep an eye on their Int/Att scores as they use the facilities.

At the end of each semester, there’s a test. Student grades will be tallied and the school will be given a rating and a ranking. The higher the rating/ranking, the more money you get, so it’s in your interests to ensure each class’ grade average is as high as possible — tap on a classroom to see the whole class’ average as well as students’ individual grades.

Building Up

As you pass Challenges and pass other milestones, reports in the school newspaper will be published, increasing your potential catchment area. As this happens, a flow of Transfer Students will join your school. Each will bring an entrance fee with them, and some will also offer a monetary gift from their parents. The more students you have, the more tuition you get per month.

Once your classrooms are full or the flow of Transfer Students stops, that’s a signal that it’s time to hire a new teacher. Pick one with a reasonable salary but a good range of stats, particularly those which aren’t covered by your existing staff member. Teachers’ “grades” determine how much benefit students get from the classes they hold at the start of each semester as well as the special classes — each time you hold a special class, one of your teachers is picked randomly to hold it.

Levelling up a teacher requires Research Points — the exact type and amount depends on the individual teacher. Gaining a level gives the teacher a 20% pay rise and 30-90 Education Points to spend on their “grades”. Try and specialise each teacher one at a time — all grades carry equal weight, so there’s no need to get Eng/Ma/Sci up first, whatever the National Curriculum might tell you. Pick one and try and get it up to 100, then move on to another.

Budget carefully — at the end of each month, you’ll see a brief rundown of how much you spent on facility upkeep, how much you spent on teacher salaries and how much income you got from students. Ideally the latter figure should be higher than the former two combined. If you want to check your budget in detail, go into the menu, tap School > School Info then tap on the info window that pops up.

Creating Spots

Once you’re making a healthy profit each month, you can look at expanding your school. When building new facilities, the most efficient thing to do is combine groups of three facilities together into Popular Spots. These then get a bonus which they also provide to surrounding facilities, making them more effective. The more a facility is used, the better it gets, too — tap on a facility to see how many more times it has to be used before it will level up.

Known Spot combinations are listed under Lists > Spot Guide. Over time, you’ll unlock more “recipes” but not all are listed. Here’s a partial list:

Relaxing Spot: Azalea, Grass, Bench
Waiting Spot: Bulletin Board, Big Rock, Rest Room
Power Spot: Well, Woods, Grass
Garden Spot: Grass, Field, Water Fountain
Art Spot: Art Room, Music Room, Misc Room
Study Spot: Principal Room, Library, AV Room
Spooky Spot: Music Room, Lab, Incinerator
Friend Spot: Water Fountain, Nurse’s Room, Lounge
Date Spot: Tennis Court, Woods, Library
Exercise Spot: Running track, B-Ball Court, Vending Room
Jealousy Spot: Incinerator, Cafeteria, Home Ec Room
Election Spot: Principal’s Office, Teacher Room, Lounge
Homey Spot: Nurse’s Room, Home Ec Room, Rest Room
Shopping Spot: Snack Store, Tiny Mart, Cafeteria
Meat Spot: Pig Room, Cow Room, Cafeteria
Water Spot: Water tile, Rest Room, Well
Cooking Spot: Incinerator, Home Ec Room, Water Fountain

In order to create some of these Spots, you’ll need to research the relevant facilities. To do this, pop up the menu, go into Admin > Research. Each facility costs a certain amount of money and Research Points to unlock, then each will take a period of time to create. You can’t research everything initially — more facilities will unlock as time passes. You’ll know when you can research something new by a pop-up saying you’ve got a “new request”. When looking at the Spot Guide, “Can Build” means that you have the capability to research all the necessary facilities, whereas “Cannot Build” means that you won’t be able to research or build at least some of the facilities for a while yet.

Career Guidance and Graduation

When your students reach their third year, you need to start paying attention to their career paths, as this will determine how much money you get when they graduate in month 3 of their last year. Use Lists > Student List to view their grades, stats and success rate in their career. Anyone with a yellow success rate (80%+) is likely to succeed, so you can leave them be in most cases. For anyone else, you may want to consider giving them some career guidance.

Students with no career planned will become part-timers upon graduation. This has a 100% success rate but returns a poor amount of money, so if you have the time and resources, advise them on an appropriate career.

To give career guidance, you need to use Research Points to create a Career Change item from the Admin > Items menu. Then tap on a student either on the screen or in the Student List and choose Use Item to apply it to them. You’ll see a range of careers, success rates and salaries — pick one with a good chance of success and decent salary. You’ll get an award of 5% of the total salaries of all your graduating students when they leave, so it’s in your interests to get them into as highly-paid jobs as possible.

Other Ways of Making Money

Certain facilities, such as the Vending Room and Snack Store, gain you money whenever students or teachers use them. This will provide a small income.

Fields will provide a slow but steady income, too. Build fields where students and teachers can reach them, next to paths. They’ll plant and harvest crops automatically at regular intervals, providing money on harvest.

Animal rooms provide income in a similar manner to fields, but you can build fewer of them.

All facilities are made more effective and provide more money depending on the amount of Spirit they have — Spirit is raised by planting trees, flowers and other nice things around them.

Where Now?

It’s up to you after that. From hereon you’ll have a steady string of things vying for your attention — do you prioritise your third years’ grades? Research? Build? Up to you — but remember you’ve only got until your tenth year to record a high score.

If you find your supply of transfer students drying up and your income dwindling, hire more teachers. Four teachers can handle six full classes — you’ll need to build another Teachers’ Room if you want to hire more.

Hope that’s helped. I haven’t covered everything by any means, but that sums up everything I’ve figured out about the game so far.