Category: Not Games

#oneaday Day 534: Who's Buying the Crap?

I'm pretty sure I already knew this some time ago, but I've come to the not-so-startling conclusion recently that I'm the one buying the crap games and listening to terrible music and enjoying awful films. It's not a conscious decision to be contrary, but I do find myself more willing than some to give creative works that have been somewhat maligned the benefit of the doubt — and more often than not actually end up enjoying them.

The first time I recall this happening was one summer when I was home from university. I got very bored and decided that I was going to go to the cinema by myself, just pick a movie that happened to be on, sit down, watch it and attempt to enjoy it. It was partly borne from a desire to prove wrong the unwritten rule that going to the cinema by yourself is somehow shameful (if it is, why is watching a DVD by yourself OK?) and partly just out of a desire to get out of the house.

The movie I went to see? 2 Fast 2 Furious. It was terrible, of course, but I enjoyed it a great deal. And the reason for this was the fact that I didn't feel "accountable" to anyone — there was no-one with me judging my tastes or making me believe that I should feel a certain way about this piece of entertainment that was bombarding me with nonsense. ("Wow, bro, it's like a ho-asis in here!") Judged entirely on its own merits and on whether or not it performed the function I wanted it to at that specific moment in time — to entertain me without making me have to think too much — it succeeded admirably.

More recently, I found similar joy in Duke Nukem Forever. The thing that annoyed me most about the vitriolic reviews scattered around the web was the fact that all the critics seemed to feel somehow "responsible" for their audience, like they had a moral obligation to dislike it because of its more questionable elements or its rough edges. I played it and enjoyed it — genuinely — and was surprised there weren't a few more people willing to stand up and be counted, saying "look, yes, it is crass, it is rude, it is inappropriate, but for fuck's sake lighten up." But that's by the by — if you found it objectionable, that's your business, but it doesn't make me wrong either.

Most recently, the recent Steam sale encouraged me to pick up Alpha Protocol, a game I've been curious about for some time. Roundly panned on its release for poor AI, questionable game mechanics and outdated graphics, most people seemed to think it was one to pass by. But for three quid I wasn't about to let that happen. So far I've enjoyed it greatly. I don't mind that the shooting and the AI isn't great because I'm not very good at shooters or stealth games. What Alpha Protocol has provided for me so far is a 24-esque espionage plot with action sequences where I at least feel like I'm a badass spy, even if the execution means it's quite difficult to mess things up, from what I can tell. The key thing about the game is its story, and for that, I'm willing to forgive its flaws — some may say too forgiving.

This is a pattern I've continued for as long as I remembered. Back when I bought CDs (oh so many years ago) I tended to purchase music on something of a whim rather than with the charts or peer reactions in mind. I bought things out of curiosity, because I liked the cover art, because I thought the singer was hot. And there's very few of those decisions I regretted, because it gave me the opportunity to experience some things that many other people might never have been exposed to.

I'm cool with that. It gives me interesting things to talk about when people want to know about obscure games, cheesy music or crap films. Everyone knows Halo and Call of Duty are good. But how many people can vouch for the awesomeness of Doom: The Roguelike?

#oneaday Day 533: More Thoughts on Google+

So I've been using the service for a few days now and the fact I've made it a Pinned Tab in Chrome should tell you how much I like it. I think it's got a huge amount of potential, and I sincerely hope that it takes off. I also sincerely hope it doesn't just morph into an identikit Facebook — but hopefully that won't happen, because although Google is gradually spreading itself over all aspects of the web, they haven't (yet) done anything that particularly offends me from a privacy or usability perspective. In fact, every change they've made to their services while I've been a user has been for the better.

So let's go over some thoughts, tips and tricks in handy bullet-point form, for those of you who are just getting started — or those who have been using it for a while. Or those who tried it once and immediately gave up. Or, well, just anyone interested, really.

  • Circles are made to be used. Use them! Make as many as is practical for you. Don't stick with the Facebook approach of keeping everyone in one Friends list. There will be some crossover between Circles as a natural process, particularly if you and your friends share some common interests, but they're there to be useful. Case in point: today I shared my GamePro articles only with those who are specifically interested in video games (which, as it happens, is most of my friends currently on G+) — once more people get in there, that facility will be a godsend.
  • The photo interface is gorgeous. The photo viewer looks great and has a nice layout, and the way the photos are tiled on the album page is attractive and distinctive. My only quibble is that you can't rename an album — or so I thought. As it happens, since G+ photo albums are actually albums on Picasa, to change an album name all you need to do is go to Picasa's website and change it there. Hopefully Google will add the facility to do this within G+ shortly — because, as I found out tonight, long album titles break the page layout.
  • You can format stuff with special characters, not HTML. Putting *asterisks* either side of a word/phrase/sentence/paragraph makes it bold. Putting _underscores_ either side of something makes it italic. Putting -dashes- either side of something makes it strikethrough. You don't appear to be able to underline things.
  • Buzz is shit. I turned on Google Buzz because it adds a tab to your profile where your Twitter feed, Google Reader shared items and various other goodies can be automatically shared. However, this only appears on your profile and takes literally hours to update, making the auto-import from Twitter in particular utterly useless.
  • No ads is nice. I know it won't last, but using a social network with no ads makes for a lovely, clean experience.
  • Face recognition when tagging photos is a good start, but needs work. It doesn't recognise some faces, and it would be nice if it "learned" faces like iPhoto does. Still, it automatically spotting where faces are is a good start.
  • Resharing should be an option. You can post something then disable reshares and/or comments for it after it's been posted — but that might be too late. You should be able to choose whether or not a post is resharable or commentable before you post it.
  • +1 is a useful bookmarking function. More sites are starting to use it now, and having a tab on your profile for all your +1s is handy. However, as the feature grows, this list is going to become long and cumbersome. It needs to be searchable, taggable or able to be organised into some sort of hierarchy. +1s also need a Share button if you want to post them to your Circles, as currently your +1s around the Web have nothing to do with G+ besides appearing on this tab.
  • The current absence of brand pages is wonderful. Another thing that won't last, as every corporation believes it needs a presence on every major social network. But for now, the fact that G+ remains a truly person-based social network is thoroughly pleasant.
  • Notification bar across all Google apps is great. This means you're always engaged with the service, yet it's not overly intrusive. The fact this is already integrated hopefully means further service integrations in the future — Events auto-syncing with Google Calendar, for example, would be smashing.
  • Things I'm looking forward to: Themes, non-obtrusive extensions, the iOS app, further integration between Google services, the service being open to everyone.
  • Things I'm not looking forward to: Social games, brand pages, ads.

#oneaday Day 532: The Unholy Trinity

Someone found my blog by searching for the terms "trinity estates" southampton today. So I'm assuming that they're interested in the estate management company that used to be in charge of the apartment block I used to live in on White Star Place in Southampton. This area was also known as College Court, or so the mail that wasn't for me that kept getting delivered would have it, anyway.

So, hello. How are you? Are you dealing with Trinity Estates? Are you a member of staff from Trinity Estates aiming to see what your company's social media footprint is? Are you a landlord researching estate management companies prior to making the commitment to purchase an apartment to rent out?

Well, whoever you are, I can say with complete and utter confidence that Trinity Estates are a complete load of old shite. And I can tell you exactly why, too. Some of the reasons are already outlined upon this very blog, but it certainly doesn't hurt to go over them again for those who haven't encountered this useless excuse for a company. I'll say all this with the caveat that I haven't lived in Southampton since last September and it's entirely possible that they've bucked their ideas up since then, but somehow I doubt it.

Their main problem is their lack of enthusiasm to do anything. They'll write a letter, sure — in fact they write lots of letters — but when it comes to actually doing anything useful? Nah.

Let's take one example. The block I lived in had a covered car park at ground level and the apartments started on the first floor (second floor to you Americans). Inside the car park, there were lots of pipes on the ceiling — mostly waste pipes, I believe. One night I heard the sound of running water outside, but didn't think anything of it — at least not until the next morning, when I had to go and retrieve my car from the car park.

Said car park stank of shite. There was a reason for this. The sound of running water was from one of the pipes on the ceiling which had burst and was, as a result, spraying shitty water everywhere. Fortunately, my car was parked nowhere near the "blast radius", but several residents' cars were. One green car in particular was festooned with lumps of crap and wads of bog roll in the morning. I felt sorry for whoever it belonged to.

Several days later, the pipe had been "fixed". But not in a sensible manner, no. It had been fixed by wrapping duct tape around it. Duct tape that wasn't very waterproof, meaning it still leaked a bit — though thankfully not quite as much as before.

Then there was the time the basement flooded. In this case, water was actually entering the building and gushing into what turned out to be an electrical cupboard. A phone call to Trinity Estates in this case yielded an uninterested-sounding operator who said he could either get someone down to us the following day (I took great pains to point out the fact that the building was, as I had already said, flooding and presenting an increasing risk of an electrical fire) or immediately, but that there would be a charge for an emergency callout.

Eventually, it transpired that the residents would have to leave the building, because the water and electricity were going to be turned off while the problem was resolved. Thus began several days of sleeping on friends' floors — actually a relatively welcome diversion as it was not that long previously that things had gone fairly disastrously wrong in my personal life — and wondering exactly how long it would take the company that I described back then as a "festival of incompetence" to sort things out.

To their credit, things were sorted out after several days and we were able to get back in. What they had failed to take into account, however, was the fact that the building was locked with an electronic keypad which doesn't function when the electricity is off. Fortunately, a drunken chav had had the foresight to tear off the door to the basement/car park entrance to the building in a fit of drunken twattishness, so when I suddenly realised I didn't have something that I really needed, I could actually get back in without too much difficulty.

As an aside, they also said that the dirty great hole they dug outside the block for the workmen to get in would be guarded by the police 24/7 to ensure that kids wouldn't play in it. On all the occasions I went back to the block while work was supposedly going on, there were 1) no workmen in the hole 2) no policemen guarding the hole and 3) children playing in the hole. So good work there, then.

In summary, then, oh mysterious reader who came across this page in search of information on Trinity Estates' work in Southampton — they are shite, and if owning a property involved dealing with them on any level, I would urge you to think very carefully about what you're getting yourself into — or run away screaming.

If you work at Trinity Estates and you're reading this, know that you made an otherwise very nice apartment complex into quite an unpleasant place to live at times. Well done.

#oneaday Day 530: One Year Ago Today

One year ago today, according to this very blog, I was still not in possession of gainful employment, and I was frustrated with the whole jobseeking and application process.

The reason for this was, of course, the fact that job sites are shite, and I would recommend that anyone currently seeking gainful employment should avoid them completely.

They're good in theory, of course. A site featuring a searchable database of jobs by area and category? That should be awesome. That should make it ludicrously easy to find a job. That should make the entire application process streamlined, elegant and very straightforward. People will be able to get matched with awesome jobs and employers will find their model employees. Everyone's a winner.

Except they're not. Through unscrupulous recruitment agencies, listings for being a boiler engineer get mixed in with journalism listings. Recruitment agencies refuse to say what the company they're recruiting for is or where the fucking job is in the first place. And on the off chance that you do actually manage to get in touch with a recruiter, you run the risk of dealing with the HR equivalent of a cock-tease, making you think you're in with a chance of getting a job, when actually you're not.

So basically, fuck the job-hunting sites. Here's what you need to do: get on Twitter, and go directly to the people in question. Do some networking online. Talk to people. Shamelessly whore out your work — there's no shame in sharing things that 1) you're proud of and 2) potential employers might be interested in.

By following this approach rather than wasting my time with job hunting sites, I'm finally in a position where I can say I'm gainfully employed. I'm pleased to say that I'll be sticking around with GamePro, and that doing so is enough to call a "proper job". I shan't share specifics, because that would probably be inappropriate, but I shall say this: compared to this time last year, when things were shit and rubbish, things are certainly well and truly on the way up.

Which is, you know, nice.

#oneaday Day 528: Thoughts on Google+

You can't say I don't provide you with variety here, dear readers. Just yesterday I was talking about underage boys simulating anal sex in a school library in order to avoid doing work, and today I'm telling you about what may or may not be the next big thing in social networking: Google+, Google Plus, Googlyplus, G+ or whatever the hell you want to call it.

If you haven't got in yet, don't ask me for an invite at the moment as they've switched them off for now. Keep an eye on Twitter or Facebook, though — I'll let you know if I have any more spare.

So, to business. What is Google+? Well, the cynical would say it's a rebranded Facebook, and indeed we've already seen at least one article today bemoaning the fact that Google+ has some features in common with Facebook. I'm not sure why they felt the need to draw attention to this, as the features they show are pretty commonplace in all social networks.

But are those cynics right? Well… yes and no. Google+ does indeed resemble Facebook. You have a news feed, people can comment on posts, people can Like things (or "+1" in this case) and people can share content. The key difference between Google+ and Facebook is how it handles the way you interact with people. There are no "friend requests" on Google+, simply Circles. Circles is an evolution of Facebook's Groups system, in which you can categorise your friends, acquaintances and family members into, well, categories. Then, when you post something on the network, you can choose which individuals or Circles it's visible to — or even make it completely public. This is a nice idea. It allows people to tailor the content they spew out to different social groups without feeling that they need to have a "work" profile and a "professional" profile. So long as, of course, you remember to keep the stories about the hooker you threw up on to your "Drinking Buddies" Circle and don't accidentally copy in your boss.

So the way you deal with people is different. But there's more; the photo interface is simple, elegant and much better than Facebook's slightly clumsy lightbox. While I think that the lightbox was a good addition to Facebook's interface, many disagreed, and the fact it's difficult to view the image and look at the comments at the same time unless you have the highest-resolution screen in the world is not great. Google+ takes a different approach. Not only does the service allow you to upload pictures at considerably higher resolution than the artifacted messes that Facebook's compression creates, but the interface allows for simple inline commenting while still viewing the picture. It's a simple case of putting the comments in a sidebar rather than underneath the picture, and it works beautifully well.

Then there's the fact that the Photos feature on Google+ integrates with Google's Picasa service. Anything you post on Picasa will be available on Google+, and vice-versa. You can even use Picnik to edit the photo, add text and generally arse about with it, save it back to Picasa (even overwriting the original if you don't need it any more) and the modified version will be right there in your feed without you needing to refresh the page. Clever. Since Picnik is a third-party service, though, this isn't integrated quite as well as it could be — an "Edit with Picnik" option when viewing a photo on Google+ would be nice, for example — but it's early days yet. And Google+ allows simple iPhoto-style edits of colours and the like to be applied to pictures without having to leave the page, which is nice, particularly for those who either don't know a lot about photo editing or don't have the software to do anything fancy-pants.

This isn't even getting started on the excellent Sparks feature, where you can subscribe to topics of your choice and be fed a constant stream of relevant articles — which can, of course, then be shared with the Circles of your choice if you see fit.

As you can tell, I'm quite enamoured with the new service and genuinely hope it takes off. My only worry is that it, like Facebook, might try and do too much. Facebook was an excellent service when it felt personal, but now it's as much a home for businesses to engage with their clientèle as a means of communication, it's becoming increasingly irrelevant to people who just want to talk to their friends. Google+'s simple elegance that it has at the moment doesn't have any of that noise — and none of the associated spam from social games and endless "What Length of Pubic Hair Are You?" quizzes, for that matter. I'm sure it won't stay that way, as social game and app developers are already pricking their ears up at the buzz surrounding the service, but I hope it stays that way for at least a little while. There's definitely a market for a clean, clear social network with minimum fuss that offers something a little more than Twitter but a lot less than Facebook. And I think Google+ has the potential to be it if the developers handle it correctly.

#oneaday Day 527: Doing a Bum-Sex

As you may have surmised from some of the earlier entries in this blog, my experiences working as a classroom teacher were genuinely traumatic at the time, on many occasions causing me considerable amounts of stress, depression, panic attacks, you name it.

In retrospect, now I don't have to deal with the little scrotes on a daily basis, some of the things were quite amusing. These things weren't amusing at the time (and when you think about it, are often quite tragic) but now I take a perverse satisfaction in the fact that these little horrors who once made my life such a misery will surely find themselves in difficult positions in the future, unless they discover a way to stop being such a twat.

Let's take the case of Fat Barry, so named because his name was Barry and he was fat. This may sound a bit harsh, but this is a child who, among other things, decided that rather than engaging with Music lessons, he would place a cymbal on his head and wander around pretending to be a racial stereotype of a Chinese peasant in a school with a not-inconsiderable population of ethnic minorities, so in my mind he deserves all the abuse in the world.

I didn't just take Fat Barry for Music lessons. I also had the pleasure of his company in a subject known mysteriously as "Key Skills", a lesson which I didn't learn until after I'd started at the school was basically "the spaz class", where all the children too stupid (or, more often, badly behaved) to achieve anything whatsoever got the opportunity to sit around and learn how to use washing machines and read.

On one memorable occasion, the Year 8 Key Skills class was tasked with researching famous people, living or dead, that they might like to invite to a dinner party. (I hasten to add I had nothing to do with the planning of these units, so their vapid nature wasn't my choice — although it's not as if we could have got anything more intellectually stimulating out of most of them.) As befits a research task, we had relocated out of our stuffy classroom (which on one memorable occasion, I was locked in while the children found it hilarious to climb out of the window, but that's another story) into the school library.

For once, most of the kids were sitting down actually looking at books — being given the opportunity to look up things they were actually interested in rather than being forced into set topics in English, Maths, Science and all the rest meant that they were, thank the stars, engaged and quiet.

All except for two, who were conspicuously absent. Fat Barry and his friend Shane, whose defining characteristic was the fact that he habitually wore trousers slightly too short for him coupled with prominent Burberry-pattern socks. (I'm not sure Burberry actually make socks.) I could hear giggling from behind some of the shelves, so while the rest of the class were engrossed in their picture books I went to investigate.

I wasn't quite prepared for what I found. Shane was lying face-down on the floor, with Fat Barry straddling him. (Fortunately, both were fully clothed, although I'm surprised Shane could breathe.) Fat Barry was gyrating somewhat suggestively atop his friend, and I foolishly said the first thing that popped into my head.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"We're doing a bum-sex, sir!" replied Fat Barry.

In retrospect, what I should have done at that point is open the library door and yell down the echoey school corridors "What's that, Barry? You're doing a bum-sex? That's a bit gay, isn't it?" because, as everyone knows, accusations of being gay are like the worst things ever at secondary school, leading to the whole problem where genuinely gay teenagers feel that they can't come out for fear of being ridiculed. I was aware of this problem, which is perhaps why I chose not to do it.

Fat Barry wasn't gay, incidentally. He had a Grandad with a shotgun that he thoughtfully brought along to one of the rehearsals of the school play — a mildly terrifying moment — and would probably have been on the receiving end of some redneck punishment if he had come out as gay. So his proclamation of the fact he was supposedly delivering anal pleasure to his best friend on the floor of the library occurred for one reason only — to shock and appal.

It worked.

#oneaday Day 525: Heat Wave

Any time it gets a bit hot in the UK, it's a "heat wave", even if said "heat wave" only lasts for a few minutes. More than a day and you start getting into "serious risk of hosepipe ban" territory, and more than a week and the Apocalypse is clearly here. We're currently in the midst of one said "heat wave", and naturally things are going downhill fast. Apparently there are a bunch of trains that can't run because it's too hot.

Too hot? They stop running when it's snowed, they stop running when it's too hot. Did it not occur to anyone to make these transportations devices which are rather important to the British transport infrastructure a little more all-weather compatible?

Of course, as a nation, the Britons are well known for their distaste of any kind of weather whatsoever. Hot outside? Wander around complaining that it's "too hot", that it's "sticky", that you "wish there was more shade" or crack some lame joke about global warming. Raining? Mutter about it being "nice weather for ducks" (even though ducks don't like rain), be unbearably smug about the waterproofs you might be wearing or look thoroughly miserable as you get completely drenched. Grey and miserable? Bemoan the fact that there's never any "interesting" weather, huff and sigh to yourself or simply gaze into the middle distance. Snowing? God help the country as it grinds to a complete halt.

All this seems to suggest one thing: humans are clearly not designed to cope with any kind of weather condition whatsoever, at least while clothed. Clothing gets wet, or sticky, or smelly, or covered in snow and cold, or otherwise messed up. As such, the solution is clear: we must stay inside, install air conditioning and be naked at all times.

Okay, that's perhaps an extreme solution to the problem. But you'd think that given we're an indigineous species to this planet we'd be able to cope a little better with a bit of sunshine or a bit of water falling from the skies.

Me, I like it when it's raining. I like the sound it makes. It's a relaxing sound — an opinion backed up by the fact that various "noise machine" apps for iPhones and whatnot often include the sound of rain as a default noise to fall asleep to. Sun I can take or leave. It's nice for it to be warm, but having to squint in order to see anything and running the risk of looking like a lump of well-cooked ham after spending too long outside is always something of a risk.

One thing is absolutely for sure, though — it's bloody boiling in this room right now, thanks in part to the weather and thanks in part to the amount of technology in a fairly confined space. All respect to my PC, which is coping admirably with the heat and is somehow managing to remain one of the coolest things in the room.

It goes without saying that I'm ho– no, I can't do it. Seriously.

#oneaday Day 524: Live and Let Live

The whole "OMG YOU MUST SEE THEM LIVE" argument has never really washed with me. In my admittedly limited experience of going to gigs, the experience of hearing a beloved band (or, in one case, a beloved band of my friends', and one which I was totally unfamiliar with) performing their best work on stage is infinitely inferior to sitting down, putting their album on your high-falutin' home theatre setup and cranking up the volume.

For one, the people in charge of the mixing desks at all the gigs I've been to felt that the bass should clearly be the highest number, meaning the subtleties of the sound were completely overwhelmed by the WHUBBBB WHUBBB WHUBBBBB of the bass. I know there are people who specifically go in search of music that goes WHUBBBB WHUBBBB WHUBBBB but I'm not sure there's as much crossover with fans of guitar bands as some sound engineers think.

The other thing is all those bloody other people that are milling around blocking your view, bumping into you and spilling your drinks. You may well give the "oh, it's all part of the atmosphere" argument here, but, well, I think we're rapidly establishing that the only kind of atmosphere I'm particularly interested in is one where I can sit in front of the fire with a pipe and listen to some records of the hippity-hop music on my high-fidelity home stereo audio system, preferably with some sort of family-friendly dog or cat sprawled out in front of the fire at the same time.

My attitude towards a lot of live music, I think, is why I've never had any interest whatsoever in going to Glastonbury, Reading or any of the other festivals there are. Living out of a tent? Fine, I could do that. Living out of a tent and sharing limited toilet facilities with approximately eleventy bajillion unwashed hippies smoking the crack? (Well, maybe not all of them smoking the crack. Some of them are shooting up heroin.) No thanks. The toilet facilities on my primary school camping trip terrified me enough to not shit for a week (I wouldn't recommend it — that first shit after a week will 1) be immensely difficult and 2) present you with some of the more unpleasant things that will ever come out of your body) so I shudder to think the effect that Glastonbury would have on my bowels and arse, especially with the quality of the food as it is there.

Perhaps I'm missing the point. I have a feeling that I am, because otherwise that many people wouldn't converge on Glastonbury year after year and see apparently increasingly-mainstream headline acts (I believe Beyoncé is on as I write this) and mutter to themselves about how it "used to be better".

Ah well. Live and let live. They have their field full of mud. I have my pixelated tower block simulators and 2D multiplayer Team-Fortress-2-in-aeroplanes joy Altitude (which I discovered tonight — seriously, it's awesome). I think we're all happy with our lot. Ish, anyway.

(As an aside, can I just say that this weekend has gone by entirely too quickly for my liking and I'd very much like another one, please. That said, this week I'm expecting to be able to share some exciting news, so perhaps it's good that this week is starting imminently.)

#oneaday Day 522: Addressing the Audience's Demands

So in an attempt to better understand my audience, such as you are, I've been delving once again into the top search terms for my blog. I'm going to take the top ten search terms from the last year and address each and every one of them individually so that hopefully if you've been in attendance on this page at some point in the past and found it to be wanting for further information on the topic you searched for, you'll feel better and more satisfied in your choice of Google links that you clicked on.

Divine Divinity (303 hits)

Divine Divinity is an action-RPG from Larian Studios which bears more than a passing resemblance to Blizzard's Diablo series. The difference is that the world is not randomly generated and there is a more robust quest and interaction system more akin to something like the Baldur's Gate series. The entire world is available to explore from the get-go and aside from some appalling voice acting of the very worst kind, it's a great game. Pity its sequels aren't up to much. You can grab it from Good Old Games.

I'm Not Doctor Who (81 hits)

That's the name of this site, because my name is Peter Davison, though I usually go by "Pete" because I prefer it. Peter Davison, as you may know, was the stage name for Peter Moffett, who played the Doctor in Doctor Who between 1982 and 1984. I am not him, therefore I am not Doctor Who.

Offensive GIFs (73 hits)

Here's one.

Teaching Sucks (65 hits)

Teaching does indeed suck. I've worked as a classroom teacher on two separate occasions in my life and on both occasions it nearly killed me. In the first instance, I stuck it out for three years in the secondary school music classroom — my first year in a run-down school half a million quid in the red where I was threatened with being knifed on a regular basis, and my second in an ostensibly "nicer" area but which still reduced me to a literally gibbering wreck by the end of my time there.

The reasons why it sucks? Poor behaviour and teachers' lack of power to do anything about it. Ridiculous amounts of bureaucracy. The fact that one person is expected to do what, in any other job, a team of at least four or five people would take on between them.

If you can stick it out, fair play to you. It's not for me.

"Mandatory Sex Party" (35 hits)

This was a term coined by Allie Brosh, who at one point wasn't sure whether or not it was an actual thing that happened. I'm still not sure, but there's certainly a lot more than one Google hit for it now.

Persona 4 (35 hits)

Persona 4 is one of my favourite games of all time. Featuring a hugely lengthy quest, genuinely loveable characters, a gripping (if crazy) plot and a love-it-or-hate-it catchy soundtrack, Persona 4 is one of the greatest JRPGs of all time and I will fight you if you disagree.

Fatal Labyrinth (34 hits)

Fatal Labyrinth is a graphical roguelike for the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis. You can play it as part of the Sega Mega Drive Collection on the Xbox 360 and PS3, but I bet you haven't.

"Get Rich or Die Gaming" (27 hits)

Get Rich or Die Gaming is an absolutely terrible Xbox Live Indie Game with artwork that looks like it was put together in Microsoft Paint, voice acting that would make a school play's director blush and designs on being a point-and-click adventure. Fair play to them for actually releasing it, but it really is not very good.

NSFW GIFs (26 hits)

Here's one.

Memes GIF (25 hits)

(Click to embiggen. Some NSFW. Some NSF anybody. Apparently this character is called "optimized GIF dude" and is something of a meme. I'd never heard of him, actually.)

So there we are. I hope you feel suitably satisfied now. If not, go and have a sandwich and a wank.

#oneaday Day 520: The Top 5 Things I Wish You'd Stop Doing In Swimming Pools

I went swimming today having rediscovered it with Andie last weekend. I used to go a lot after work (that long-forgotten concept soon to be reawakened) alternating swim days with gym days, and while I didn't get "good" as such, I certainly found myself able to swim surprising lengths without too much difficulty — or indeed speed, but that's beside the point.

Today I managed 1km, which equates to 40 lengths of the pool I was in. I'd got up to being able to do 100 lengths at one point and to be fair, I could have kept going today were it not for the fact I needed to get home and Get Shit Done.

So, in honour of my swimming achievements I'd like to present the Top 5 Things I Wish You'd Stop Doing In Swimming Pools.

Putting on deodorant before getting in the pool

Seriously, Lynx-clad chav boy, who do you think you are impressing by making yourself smell like a gypsy's jockstrap before jumping in the pool? You'll only stink of chlorine in approximately 5 minutes anyway, so you might as well not bother, because swimming through the cloud of "aromatic" chemicals emanating from your person as they rinse off your hairless body under the water is anything but pleasant.

Finding your kids splashing people in the face amusing

Yes, a kid learning to swim is probably very exciting for a parent, but when some 6-year old git splashes me in the face obviously deliberately and you sit there laughing at him, that's giving him positive reinforcement and unspoken permission to do it again. I would very much like it if he didn't do it again, thanks, because it went up my nose and made me cough, and it also made me hate him, and you.

Prancing around naked in the changing room

Yes, I am aware that you need to get naked in order to get changed to go swimming. But do you have to be naked for quite so long and towel-dry your testicles quite so enthusiastically? And if your friend is with you, don't you find it a little weird to stand there talking to him with your cock hanging out? If you weren't in a swimming pool changing room you wouldn't do it, would you? If you were both in your bedroom or living room it would be a bit weird, wouldn't it? Unless, of course, there's some sort of homoerotic tension between the two of you, in which case you should hurry up and consummate your love elsewhere and stop inflicting sexual tension on the rest of the pool's visitors.

Getting pissy with people in the slow lane

I swim slowly, as do numerous other people. We don't have a "super-slow" lane to downgrade ourselves to. You, however, have a "medium" lane which you can upgrade yourself to. Please use it. I bet you walk on the left on Underground escalators, too.

Being there

Frankly, I like the pool better when it's just me (and maybe one companion) there. Kindly bugger off out of my way and, preferably, the pool so that I can enjoy the time in the pool I have paid for. Sure, you may have paid for it too, but I am grumpier than you. Go and see your naked friends in the changing room.