#oneaday Day 834: RUMOUR: Rumours 'Rumoured', Says Rumour-Monger

If you've ever started a conversation with "I heard that…" and then gone on to explain exactly how you heard somewhere/from some guy in the pub/from "The Internet" that something awesome/awful is going to happen, then I urge you to think before you speak in future. Because if you continue with that sentence, you're simply feeding the rumour mill, and the rumour mill doesn't produce good things and help us make the Bread of Truth. It produces garbage and poo, and then squishes it all out into the world's most unpleasant pâté.

Tortured (and gross) metaphors aside, it's a fact that I wish more people — particularly in the press — would cotton on to.

Today, for example, saw news that Liberty X "might be" reforming for a new album and a tour. Firstly, I don't think anyone wants that, and secondly, the only evidence that such a reunion "might be" happening is the fact that they were photographed together outside the ITV studios and — get this — they were smiling. Stop the fucking presses.

There are a ton of journalism sectors that are particularly prone to this. Showbiz columns report who might be sleeping with whom. Sports columns report who might be moving to some other club for a disproportionately enormous amount of money. Music and arts columns report who might be working on what. And then, of course, there are the tech-related industries.

Anything related to Apple is accompanied by an inordinately huge amount of rumourmongering, for example. In the run-up to the company's announcement of the third-generation iPad, all sorts of nonsense was flying around. This ranged from suggestions that it might not have a Home button to the frankly astonishing assertion that the reason iOS apps had started having textures like leather and the like in the background was because the new iPad would have a haptic display — i.e. one where you could feel textures as well as see them.

The video games industry is far from immune, either. Rarely a week goes by without one outlet reporting on some rumour from a mysterious, anonymous source and the "story" then being picked up by every other news site on the Web as if it were fact. This particular rumour mill goes into overdrive as a hardware generation starts to wind down and people start wondering what the next generation of consoles might look like. Inevitably, the vast majority of stories turn out to be absolute bollocks, and on the rare occasions when an outlet or reporter writes something that turns out to be true, there's at least a day's worth of smug, self-satisfied cries of "Called it."

No you didn't. You were throwing darts blindfolded, and you happened to hit a lucky bulls-eye. Your other fifteen darts are embedded in the barman's testicles, the barmaid's left boob, the right ear of that hard-looking dude who drinks absinthe by the pint and the TV that was showing the Bolton v Wigan match. (Everyone is angry. I'd run, if I were you.)

So why do we persist on reporting on these festering sores on the very arse of journalism? Because they attract attention, particularly if they're controversial. If one site prints a story that Liberty X is reforming, or that the next Xbox will feature a system to prevent used games from working on it, or that the iPhone 5 really, totally, absolutely positively is coming out this time, then that will attract commenters like flies around shit. And that means page hits, advertising revenue and the little graphs that make the men in suits happy moving in an upward direction. Who cares if it's absolute nonsense dreamed up by someone who cleans the toilets at Microsoft? Print it!

I make a point of not reading any stories that start with the prefix "RUMOUR:" now. And should I ever find myself back on the news desk for a popular gaming website, I will most certainly do everything in my power to avoid reporting on such nonsense — unless some actual investigation turns up something interesting, of course. But blindly parroting another site's "anonymous source"? No. Just no.

So, then, I reiterate: think before you speak/write/publish. Because rumours are rarely helpful. Remember that time it spread around the whole school year that you'd shat your pants when in fact you'd just sat in some mud?

Yeah. That.

#oneaday Day 831: Another Year

So, as of the time of writing, I've just turned thirty-one years old. As becomes increasingly common as the years pass by, it doesn't feel any different to being thirty.

I was mostly prepped for the supposed horror of turning thirty by my parents. My father in particular apparently didn't take to turning thirty all that well, so I was expecting a semi-to-fully traumatic experience. It actually turned out to be a rather pleasant experience, as I was whisked off on a weekend to London by my girlfriend Andie, and then had the chance to see a bunch of friends for curry and good times.

A lot has happened in the space of the last year. Having been forced to move back home with my parents due to my shattered personal life from the year prior, in August I moved back out again. At the time I was working for GamePro and was earning a decent wage from it, too, so Andie (who was also living with her mother at the time) and I decided that we were both in a situation where we could get a house and move in together. So we did. And that was good.

Since that time, GamePro collapsed — in December of last year, to be specific. I was very sad about this, as I felt I'd found my "calling" — I did a great job of posting the daily news there, and my hard work was appreciated by the people I was working for. I was grateful for the opportunity, grateful to be accepted and appreciated in what I was doing, and grateful to, for the first time in my life, have a job that I actually enjoyed.

I was half-expecting the collapse of GamePro to signal another disastrous collapse in my own personal circumstances. At the time, I didn't have enough money saved up to survive for very long and still be able to pay my tax bill at the beginning of next year. I started frantically applying for jobs and finding the same situation I had done prior to starting at GamePro — no-one was interested in me. I don't know whether it was my lack of "relevant" qualifications for certain sectors, my wide-ranging experience that covered both teaching and writing positions, or something else. Whatever it was, it carried a significant risk of making me feel like absolute crap again.

Fortunately, I found myself with a new job before long, and I'm enjoying it. I'm constantly learning new stuff, too, which is a big bonus. My writing may not be quite so much in the "mainstream" public eye any more, but I'm find with that; it means that I have to deal with far fewer hormonal teenagers who can't spell, punctuate or formulate an argument. I also haven't had any accusations of being a paedophile since starting my new job, either, which is always nice.

What else? I've bought a new computer, bought an Android tablet, discovered My Little Pony, played all three of the "Operation Rainfall" role-playing games on the Wii, finally started playing Nier, started a few creative projects, started, stopped, started, stopped and started again at the gym lots of times… the list goes on. When put that way, it probably doesn't sound all that interesting, really. But I can't say it's been a shitty year, unlike certain previous years I could mention. On the whole, it's been a reasonably good year and hopefully things will just continue to improve.

Now it's time to go to bed. I've had friends over playing TrackMania, Dungeon Defenders, 7 Wonders and Catan this evening, with more arriving tomorrow for further board game fun and frolics.

See you on my "proper" birthday.

#oneaday Day 826: No Kind of Atmosphere

I've been watching Red Dwarf on Netflix recently. In the process I've discovered that there's actually a hell of a lot of that series that I'd never seen before, so I've been delighted to (re)discover it.

Red Dwarf was one of those series that That One Guy At University Who Endlessly Quoted Things endlessly quoted. Well, perhaps not endlessly — sometimes he was quoting Blackadder. I'm only just now, some ten years later, coming around to the idea that I can actually watch those shows again without hearing That One Guy At University Who Endlessly Quoted Things' voice in my head.

That's beside the point though. And the point is that Red Dwarf is still an excellent series, for more reasons than one.

First up, it's quite simply an excellent comedy series. The small cast of exaggerated characters makes for some excellent comic situations. The fact that all of the characters have at least one major flaw in their personalities is what makes them entertaining, too — Lister is arguably the closest we get to a "straight man" in the show, but even he's flawed; he's gross, he's selfish and his reliance on curry as his primary form of sustenance doubtless makes him rather unpleasant to live with. Rimmer, meanwhile, is by turns arrogant and crippled by self-doubt; The Cat is vain to a fault; and Kryten has difficulty with acting independently when it conflicts with his programming. Put these dysfunctional characters together and you have a recipe for plenty of comic conflict.

The less-considered side of the show is that it's actually a surprisingly decent sci-fi show, too. While it doesn't have anywhere near the budget of what we might be used to from more recent titles — or even shows like Star Trek: The Next Generation, which ran at a similar time — it manages to convey a convincing feeling of what Life Is Like In The Future. The show doesn't batter the audience over the head with lengthy descriptions of what things do or how they work; rather, it simply drops things into conversation that make it clear that we're absolutely not on 21st century Earth any more.

Part of this comes from the show's use of language. Its use of terms like "smeg", "gimboid", "goit" and numerous other faux-expletives was initially to get around the fact that it wasn't okay to say certain things on television, but over time these words became part of the show's identity. Numerous other shows have taken a similar approach since — Firefly features Chinese swearing, for example, while Battlestar Galactica features the multi-purpose invective "frak" at regular intervals. (It's not clear how much Red Dwarf's use of fake swear words influenced these titles, if at all.) Initially, the presence of these words is jarring as you wonder what they mean and why they're not simply using regular expletives. But over time, as you become invested in the worlds created by the writers, you begin to let these words wash over you and enter your vocabulary even though, in most cases, they're completely made up, portmanteau words or "loan words" from another language.

Ultimately, Red Dwarf succeeds due to the fact it never tries to get ideas above its station. It knows that it's a low-budget sci-fi comedy with a small cast, and rarely attempts to deviate too much from that formula. Some may argue that the later seasons do deviate from this formula and are consequently weaker as a result, but having not (re)watched them yet, I'm not going to comment on that right now. One thing the show doesn't do, however, is rest on its laurels; each season has its own distinctive identity, and it's quite fascinating to see the changes it goes through as the years pass by and the budget increases.

It's still great, then, in short, and if you've never had the pleasure of watching it, then you should check it out. It's all on Netflix (in the UK, anyway), so be sure to check it out if you're a member.

#oneaday Day 825: Bull, Horns, That Sort of Thing

The Black Dog of depression has been rearing its ugly head a bit again recently for various reasons, and I'm sick of it. While there's not necessarily much I can do about it showing up and being a pain in the arse, I can at least try and work on some things to make me feel a bit better about myself.

For starters, getting upset at one's own reflection isn't particularly great news, and it's something that I can at least attempt to do something about. I have been fitness-ing off and on for some time now, but I figure it's Time To Get Serious. That means I'm going to hit the gym every morning before I start my working day rather than leaving it until last thing in the evening when it's easy to go "nah, fuck it". (Of course, it's easy to stay in bed and say "nah, fuck it" also, but I'm going to attempt to get out of this habit before it starts.) I won't necessarily be doing everything every day, but I'm going to attempt to get at least an hour of cardio stuff in per day at the very least. This will likely mostly be done on the exercise bikes, where I can sit back and play Final Fantasy VI on my fancy-pants tablet while I'm sweating. At other times, I'll use the crosstrainers and whack on a podcast — the Exploding Barrel Podcast from my good buddies Mike and AJ Minotti is always a favourite — or some inspirational music of some description.

As motivation and progress tracking, I'm going to be using Fitocracy, which I've posted about before here. I also considered resurrecting my Jedi Health Kick Tumblr from a while back, but given that Fitocracy provides the ability to post lengthy, blog-like status updates and has its own built-in community features, I'm going to stick with that. As well as tracking my workouts, I'm going to write a short post each day detailing how it went, how I'm feeling and what I'm aiming for. I'm also going to use Fitocracy's excellent Quests feature to take on some challenges that I might not have otherwise thought of — this will help prevent complacency if I'm making a "game" out of it all.

I'd also like to eat better. I think I eat when I get depressed, and I get depressed a fair bit, which doesn't help matters. I'd rather kick that particular habit in the face if possible — or at the very least change it so I munch on, say, carrot sticks instead of ALL THE BISCUITS, but that's the sort of thing that will take plenty of teeth-clenching willpower to resolve. I have faith in my own ability to do this, however — if there's one thing I'm good at it's clenching my teeth and stubbornly resisting things. Sainsbury's cream cakes are my most formidable adversary to date, however, so it remains to be seen whether I'll be able to defeat them using the power of my clenched teeth (and/or buttocks) alone.

So that's the plan. We'll see how long I'm able to stick with it. I'm saying this publicly so I have a bit more pressure to follow through on it. If anyone would care to join me and work out alongside me or just offer some words of encouragement, come cheer me on over on Fitocracy — it's free to sign up and there's a nifty companion iPhone app too.

#oneaday Day 823: Information Diet

Know what I hate? Chavs. Know what else? Teaching. Know what else? We could be here a while. I'll tell you. Press embargoes.

I get why they happen, obviously — publishers and their PR people want to ensure that coverage of something is coordinated nicely so that everyone gets suitably whipped up into a frenzy all at the same time. But there's an unfortunate side-effect if you happen to, say, follow a bunch of different video games outlets at the time a major announcement happens: everyone bellows the same fucking thing at the exact same fucking time.

It's happening more and more nowadays, too. The most notable examples that stick in my head in recent memory are Assassin's Creed III and Borderlands 2, both titles that I have a passing interest in but find myself becoming curiously resistant to the more and more I get battered in the face with the same information from slightly different angles.

I think, on the whole, this is the "problem" I have been having with mainstream gaming overall. There's too much information out there — too much coverage, too many "behind the scenes" videos, too many "exclusive" interviews, too many press releases announcing a single screenshot (yes, that is a real thing I received today and I have no shame in naming Square Enix as the perpetrator). After a while, you become completely saturated with information about a product and subsequently have absolutely no inclination to want to touch it, ever. This was a big part of why I didn't want to play Mass Effect 3, for example — EA's appalling behaviour was just the straw that broke the camel's back, really.

I feel for my friends who work in games PR for "B-tier" games, too. It's hard enough to get a title like, say, Risen 2 noticed at the best of times but when you're competing with everyone beating themselves into an orgasmic and/or angry frenzy over Mass Effect 3, there's little hope for your title outside of groups of people like me who have forsaken the mainstream in favour of enjoying less heavily marketed titles.

Conversely, the games I have been playing and enjoying are the ones where information has been trickling out slowly, usually straight from the developers mouths without dribbling through the PR sieve. Take the "Operation Rainfall" RPGs Xenoblade Chronicles, The Last Story and Pandora's Tower (which I'm currently playing), for example — these received very little in the way of press attention despite being fantastic games. The aforementioned Operation Rainfall, a grassroots campaign to get these three excellent games localised and released in Europe and the US, received plenty of press, but information on the games themselves was conspicuously absent. As a result, I was able to go into all three of them pretty much blind and have a fantastic experience in the process — a big part of what made all of them great is the sense of discovery inherent in all of them. That just doesn't happen if you've been smothered in information for the six months leading up to the game's release.

As a result of all this, I've come to a decision, and if you're feeling the same way as me, I recommend you follow it too.

Cut back. Cut out the crap. If you follow a buttload of games journalists and outlets on Twitter, unfollow them. If you want some gaming news, pick one outlet and keep it on your follow list, but chances are if you follow lots of gaming fans, someone will retweet the news as it happens anyway. Otherwise, go seek out the news when it's convenient for you. Check the sites when you feel like it. Subscribe to their RSS feeds. Use Google Currents or Flipboard to receive information in an easily-digestible format. Receive information on your terms, not that of a carefully-crafted PR campaign.

This doesn't have to apply just to games — it can apply to pretty much anything that suffers from the problems described above. Film, TV, celebrity news, business, tech… anything, really.

I'm going to give this a try. It will doubtless initially feel somewhat weird to not see some familiar faces and logos in my Twitter timeline, but I have a strange feeling that I'll be a lot happier, less frustrated and less cynical as a result. Check back with me in a week or two and we'll see.

(If you're one of the people I do happen to unfollow, it's nothing personal. You just might want to consider getting separate professional and personal accounts!)

#oneaday Day 822: Xoom, Xoom, Xoom, Xoom, I Want You In My Room

I've been spending quite a lot of time with my shiny (well, rather fingerprinty now) new Motorola Xoom since it arrived the other day, and I have to say I'm a big fan. While Android seems to be a little more clunky than iOS, particularly prone to slowing down for no apparent reason on occasion, I'm appreciating the things it does do. Having a fully-customisable homescreen is very pleasant, certainly, and the cool quasi-3D effect it does with the wallpaper is pretty neat.

What's becoming abundantly clear to me as I continue to use it, however, is that using it simply feels very different to the iPad. It might be the fact it's designed to be used in landscape as opposed to the iPad's default portrait orientation; it might be the unique array of apps on offer on both devices; it might be a combination of interface elements. I'm not sure exactly what it is, but I can say that both devices certainly have a place in my life at this moment for different reasons — and also that getting the Xoom has caused my desire for a 3rd-gen iPad to drop to zero.

If anything, the Xoom seems particularly suited for more "serious" tasks (and by "serious" I mean "not games") — I'm particularly fond of using it for Twitter, chat, email and that sort of thing. Google Currents has become my go-to app for reading the daily news. The built-in "share" functionality, which allows you to easily send stuff from one app to another easily, is pretty neat. The keyboard I have installed, which lets you type by drawing wiggly lines rather than tapping keys, makes me feel like a wizard, particularly with the sparkly particle pattern that comes from aforementioned wiggly pattern. And the inclusion of a USB port (albeit a micro-USB one that requires an adapter for pretty much every peripheral ever, making one wonder exactly why they didn't just put a regular USB port on it) means that it's possible to do things like hook up a keyboard and practically use the damn thing as a sort of laptop.

A big draw for me was the thriving emulation scene on Android, however. Within a few short moments of getting the device up and running I had downloaded NES, SNES, Mega Drive and arcade machine emulators and a few minutes later had successfully transferred my collection of ROM files of dubious origin. What I have now is a portable gaming device that plays pretty much any NES, SNES or Mega Drive game, and a whole heap of arcade games.

This… is awesome. I hadn't anticipated quite how awesome this was going to be, but the ability to play Final Fantasy VI while on an exercise bike at the gym, or Elevator Action while on the toilet, or Golden Axe while waiting for the kettle to boil… well… yes. It's awesome. The fact you can hook up a USB controller (or, for that matter, Wii Remote with Classic Controller via Bluetooth) and play these games as they were meant to be played — with actual buttons rather than floaty, crappy touchscreen controls — is a happy bonus. The fact you can use floaty, crappy touchscreen controls at times when having a controller is not convenient or socially acceptable is also most welcome.

I'm certainly not going to become one of those gits who bangs on about how much better Android is than iOS because there are things that both do far, far better than the other. But I've been very pleasantly surprised by my first experience with an Android device, and the fact it's turned out to be a portable retro-gaming powerhouse is just a happy bonus, really. Now I can finally get around to beating all the Final Fantasy games that are still on my "to-do" list. (V and VI, as it happens. Also Chrono Trigger, which may as well be a Final Fantasy game.) And, as previously mentioned, playing Elevator Action on the toilet.

Now, if you'll excuse me…

#oneaday Day 821: There are Bigger Problems in the World, Like Your Face

Second only to the patented "Everyone Is So Entitled These Days And Should Just Shut Up" argument-defuser is the ever-faithful "Everyone Should Realise That There Are Bigger Problems In The World And Should Just Shut Up" conversation-closer.

I shan't get into the former here — everyone has talked it to death and should just shut up — but I feel I should address the latter, since I saw it come up on Twitter earlier today. (And, if you're reading this and you know that you used it, fear not — this isn't a personal attack on you by any means, just my own thoughts on that particular argument.)

The trouble with the "Everyone Should Realise That There Are Bigger Problems In The World And Should Just Shut Up" argument (hereafter referred to as ESRTTABPITWASJSU) is that it assumes that people who are commenting on or complaining about something are equating their personal reaction to something that is "close" or "important" to them with something that is unquestionably a Big Problem For The World.

This is not the case at all. Recent examples where the ESRTTABPITWASJSU argument has been applied include independent game developer Phil Fish's ill-advised admonishment of the entire Japanese game development community in a very public place (and subsequent beratement of those who criticised him on Twitter, culminating with him leaving the social network altogether); and public reaction to the Mass Effect 3 ending. I have no desire to beat those particular drums in any great detail for now, so let's put the specifics aside for a moment.

Yes. There are bigger problems in the world than both of those things. There are people losing their homes and livelihoods to the economic crisis. There are people in the world with not enough food or water. There are places in the world where diseases go unchecked. There are countries that are ruled by people with only their own interests at heart, not those of their people. There are wars being fought in the name of… what? And there are people who get so passionate about their religious beliefs that they blow themselves up in the name of their god, usually killing many other people in the process.

These are big problems. They are fucked up, massive, humongous problems that we, as individuals, can do very little about. Sure, we can throw our money at charities and, if we're feeling particularly activist-y, attempt to take some sort of action against. But realistically (or pessimistically, if you prefer) there is very little that Josephine McAveragepants can do about these things since she does not run a government and/or army and/or bank. The problems become so massive that they take on an unreal quality — they often feel like they take place in a parallel reality distant from our own.

This is why people prefer to turn their attentions to problems they feel they can solve, or that they feel they can at least have an impact on. They have every right to do that. They may often have selfish interests at heart, but recent examples of organised action aimed at these relatively minor issues have proven that it's far from being isolated individuals shouting and screaming about Games for Windows Live in Dark Souls or whether the Mass Effect 3 ending constituted false advertising (apparently, according to one Better Business Bureau blogger anyway, it does, believe it or not) — these are groups of people who are prepared to stand up and be counted in order to tackle problems they feel like they can face.

It's an idealistic, utopian vision to believe that people (read: the Internet) will rise up together and do something about the bigger problems in the world than the ones they have successfully tackled to date. Maybe it will happen one day. Maybe these small "victories" will give some people the confidence to try something bigger, a little piece at a time. Protesting, say, a war is a bigger deal than signing a petition against the ending for a video game. Some people may be scared to jump in at the deep end, particularly with the apparent risk to life and limb frequently presented by the media, so they take the "safe option". They feel like their voice is being heard, but relating to an issue which is smaller, closer, more relatable.

The key thing, though, is that none of these people who are sweating the small stuff are saying that the issues they feel strongly about are more important than the Bad Shit Happening Everywhere Else In The World.

No-one is equating those things except, ironically, in many cases, those people making use of the ESRTTABPITWASJSU argument.

#oneaday Day 820: Disagreement

I hate arguing. In fact, I'd go further than that. I hate disagreeing. I have absolutely no doubt that this particular aspect of my personality is a side-effect of the social anxiety that I suffer from, but it sometimes makes discussions hard to participate in.

I'm fine with expressing my opinion and feel I can argue my viewpoint pretty convincingly in most instances — this blog is filled with numerous examples of that, as longtime readers will doubtless know. It's in the things that happen after my opinion has been stated that things get a little trickier — namely, if someone comes along with a diametrically-opposed viewpoint and the willingness (and/or ability) to argue until they're blue in the face about how much I'm wrong and how they're absolutely right.

Most of the time, these disagreements don't descend into "you're an idiot", but my discomfort with disagreeing makes me sometimes feel like it's implied. I like to think that I go through life as a fairly likeable sort of chap and take great pains to try not to offend anyone (swearing and masturbating stickmen aside, obviously — I'm referring specifically to personal attacks here) so having someone disagree with me and argue their case in an impassioned manner is a frustrating, disquieting experience that often makes me wish I had kept my mouth shut in the first place.

Part of this is due to the fact that I tend to cycle negative experiences around and around inside my head involuntarily. Even a seemingly innocuous, irrelevant discussion that might have gotten a little bit heated somewhere along the way is enough to keep me awake at night sometimes — and those rare situations where someone is actually genuinely upset by something which has occurred? I can pretty much forget about remaining calm, instead preferring to stare into space, replaying the incident in my mind and wondering what could have happened if things went a little differently.

It can happen before time, too. If I know there's some form of difficult conversation coming up, I'll find myself role-playing it in my head, imagining what might happen. Inevitably my mental conversation has the worst possible outcome, usually descending into someone getting yelled at or thumped. This does at least make having the actual conversation pleasantly surprising almost without exception, since no-one ever gets thumped and hardly anyone ever gets yelled at.

I guess part of the frustration over all this is to do with power, or more specifically, a feeling of powerlessness. If you know (or at least believe) that your opinion on something is inherently sensible and others seem to think that you're speaking gibberish, it's disheartening — particularly if said opponents of your viewpoint are aggressive and stubborn in their dismissal of what you have to say. It's particularly disappointing and upsetting when people whom you like and respect fall into this category, too.

Nine times out of ten, the argument just wasn't worth having in the first place, too. So what I have taken to doing most of the time these days is just stepping back before jumping in to a debate, thinking "will this get heated? Is it worth potentially getting upset over?" and then — only then — making a decision on whether or not to proceed. In some cases, said decision leads to launching a discussion and dealing with the consequences. In others, it leads to walking away — deleting the unsent tweet, closing the comments section, biting my tongue. And in extreme cases, it leads to me feeling like the correct course of action is simply to remove myself from the situation in question and ensure it doesn't arise again — online, that means unfriending, unfollowing and/or blocking people; offline… well, you just walk away and don't look back.

Some people are built for arguing. I don't think I'm one of them.

#oneaday Day 819: I'm a PC, and I'm a Mac...

…and I'm also a PS3, a Wii, a 360, an iOS and an Android. I'm pretty frickin' multicultural when it comes to operating systems and platforms, in short. Always have been.

The whole "platform wars" thing always bothers me. It's usually started by the media and then perpetuated by fanboys who get angrier and angrier and spew more and more meaningless vitriol at one another until everyone leaves feeling rather embarrassed about the whole thing.

This isn't a phenomenon limited to children and teenagers, either. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen grown men and women posting ridiculous comments about how much they "hate" Apple/Microsoft/Google/Sony/Nintendo/that guy Barry from the chip shop (to be fair, he is a bit of a wanker) and getting increasingly riled up when people try to talk sense into them. Or when people deliberately bait them. Or when people take their comments a little too personally and start yelling back. Or… you get the idea.

It's been going on as long as there have been rival, roughly equivalent platforms doing similar things. We see it with every generation of computers, consoles, handhelds, smartphones, tablets, operating systems… it goes on and on. And, as I say, it's usually started by the media, though in most cases it's a bit of a "light the fuse and watch" sort of scenario, whereby they'll sow the seeds of conflict and then just let consumers batter each other into submission with increasingly-dumb arguments.

I've never subscribed to this particular attitude. I don't see the point. Every platform has its pros and cons. Some are likely to be more successful than others. Some will flop, hard. But they all have their place, and if you enjoy using them or find them useful, then that's a win. If you have no use for them or don't find them interesting, cool or exciting, then that's no loss to you. There's certainly no reason to judge people who do like them, though.

Let's take the Android/iOS distinction. These two groups are regularly at each others' throats, with Android users often hijacking iOS app Facebook pages with comments that just say "Android." repeatedly under the mistaken assumption that this will make the developer of said app want to support them, and iOS users honking on about incompatibility, how much better their devices are and how cool they look. The vocal proportion of both groups are insufferable arseholes, and I really wish they would shut up.

I entered the Android brigade today with the arrival of my new Motorola Xoom tablet. I got it for several reasons — work, curiosity and the emulation scene. What I found was that I gained an immediate appreciation of what Android did, but did not suddenly find myself hating iOS, Apple and everything they stood for. Instead, from a rational, relatively neutral (well, I have been exclusively iOS for mobile for a number of years now!) point of view, I could see that both of these operating systems had distinctive purposes, and could appreciate both of them.

iOS is simple, easy, consistent and clear. You know what you're getting with an iOS device. When you run an iOS app (games aside) you generally know what the interface is going to look like, and you can usually figure out how it's going to work. This is true to such a degree that when apps make minor changes to what is seen as the "standard" way that things work, it's very uncomfortable. A good example is the Spotify iPhone app, which has the "go back" and "now playing" buttons the opposite way around to how the iPhone's native music player has — it's a little confusing and irritating. Not enough to warrant INTERNET RAGE, obviously, but it highlights the fact that most iOS apps are a little more consistent with their interface design.

The "walled garden" aspect of iOS has its place, too. For those who are new to smartphones, tablets and technology in general, the fact that everything scary is walled off means that people can experiment and gain confidence with the device without breaking anything. Apple as a company has been increasingly moving towards the more "casual", "consumer" market over the last few years — various changes to OSX indicate this, too — and the easier and more consistent things are for users, the better so far as they're concerned. All this has the side-effect of irritating self-confessed "power users", however.

But then there's Android, which would be ideal for said "power users" if they weren't so stubborn. Annoyed at lack of customisation? You can do that on Android. Wish you could transfer files to the device simply by connecting it to a USB port, not by farting around with app-specific transfer programs? Sure, go ahead. Want to use non Apple-branded accessories, including USB gizmos? Knock yourself out!

The side-effect of all this, of course, is that it provides more things to go wrong. It's still pretty difficult to break an Android device from what I can tell — at least if you haven't "rooted" it, a process which I still don't really understand — but there are more variables in play. You can install apps from places other than one single "official" App Store. There's a greater risk of malware — something which is practically nonexistent for non-jailbroken iOS devices. The interface(s) for Android apps is (are) maddeningly inconsistent at times. And although the iOS App Store carries a lot of absolute garbage, there's even more on Android.

Both have their place, in short, and both have their own flaws — just as Windows and OSX have their place; PS3, 360 and Wii have their place; and if you really want to keep on using that Palm Tungsten you've had kicking around for years now, be my guest.

In short — and I'm aware I've said this before to little effect on the Internet at large, but it's nice to at least try — people should pretty much just shut the fuck up and enjoy what they've got while ignoring what they haven't got. We'd have a much nicer world without all this envy and jealousy floating around — since, after all, that's pretty much what most fanboy arguments tend to boil down to — so why do we still do it?

I guess it's fun to be contrary. Well, you can count me out. So far as tech goes, I'm multicultural and proud.

#oneaday Day 817: Countdown to a Non-Event

It's my 31st birthday on the 29th of this month, something which I am neither massively looking forward to or dreading — it's just happening. (That said, there is the distinct possibility of nerdtastic board game action in the name of celebration, so I guess I am sort of looking forward to it.)

Birthdays are one of those things that seem massively important when you're a kid but decline in relevance as you get older, with only the big "decade change" birthdays being a particularly big deal in most cases. My 30th was pretty awesome, as it happened, since not only did my awesome girlfriend take me to London for happy funtimes (on royal wedding day, as it happened, but that didn't make things as inconvenient as I expected it might) but I then got to hang out with a goodly proportion of my UK-based friends (and one US-based friend who happened to be in the country at the time!) and eat lots of curry. Which was nice.

Thinking back on it, though, I'm not sure I can remember that many birthdays from my past. I was never particularly big on the whole "party" thing even when I was little — I remember going to plenty of other kids' parties at the local village hall, eating cake and playing Pass The Parcel, though I don't have any traumatic clown experiences to have revelations about in therapy (unless they're particularly well-hidden and repressed) and I was rarely — if ever, I forget — the actual "host" or "guest of honour" of such an event.

I'm fine with this, as it happens, though it may have begun to carve my personality into the shape it is today. A big "party" full of people I don't really know very well all putting pressure on me to have a good time is not a situation I particularly want to put myself in, particularly as it's considered impolite and/or drama queen-ish to tell everyone that you've had enough and you'd just like them all to, you know, fuck off right now please.

I think the best birthday celebrations I've had were loosely-organised affairs where I maybe had the opportunity to hang out with a few friends, but there was no real pressure on anyone to be wild, wacky or drunk. Oftentimes there was all of the above, but rarely was it forced.

One particularly memorable occasion came during my first year at university, so I guess it must have been my 19th birthday. The halls of residence flat in which I lived had become a pretty close-knit group (most of us, anyway — there was one girl who perpetually did her own thing) and so we decided that we would go to local student hotspot and well-known grot spot Clowns, a "wine bar" that had an attached basement nightclub known as Jesters.

To call Clowns a "wine bar" was to polish a turd, really, since it was simply a "bar". Okay, it served wine, but the phrase "wine bar" implies a certain degree of classiness that Clowns most certainly did not possess. Rather, it was the sort of place in which you stuck to the floor if you stood still for too long, and its companion nightclub Jesters (which seemed to be perpetually open, even during the day) was the kind of place whose toilets regularly overflowed and coated the dance floor with a sloppy mess of urine, cigarette butts and all manner of other unpleasantness. The theory was that by the time you got into Jesters, you were usually so wasted that you didn't mind what you might be stepping in/on, so it was something of a moot point.

I digress. This particular birthday celebration was one of those "unstructured" sort of occasions. Clowns was running some sort of summer special whereby they'd provide you with a four-pint jug of its signature "Juicy Lucy" cocktail for about four quid, and as such most people there were clutching said jugs like giant tankards, pouring the luminescent green concoction down their throats with gay abandon.

I remember relatively little about what we were actually doing at the pub — drinking, probably — but for some reason I have oddly lucid memories of what happened upon our return to the flat. My flatmate Chris, for one, decided that the thing to do would be to sit in the corner of my bedroom with a pair of my (clean) underpants on his head. (I believe he was later sick on his door and subsequently refused to come out of his room for the rest of the evening, though this may have been another occasion.) My friend Simon, who did not live in the same halls of residence as us, fell asleep on my bed. All I really wanted to do at this time was fall asleep, too, so I opened up my wardrobe, rested my head on the bin-bag full of laundry that was in there (surprisingly comfortable) and drifted off for a little while.

I awoke a couple of hours later to find Simon just rousing from his slumber, too.

"I'm just going to run my head under the tap and then leave," he said blearily. He stood up, and from my low vantage point I heard him go into the kitchen, run the tap as he suggested, and a few moments later, the front door banged to indicate that he had indeed left.

This occasion was clearly a silly situation in which almost nothing of any note whatsoever occurred, but for some reason it has stuck in my memory for many, many years. I can only wonder what strange memories future celebrations may burn onto my brain.