#oneaday Day 519: Good News

Almost a year ago to the day, I posted an entry on this very blog noting that I was starting to feel more positive about things. Of course, things didn't quite work out the way I planned for quite some time, but for those of you who don't follow me on Twitter, I'm pleased to report that today, Tuesday June 21, 2011, I was offered an actual job from an actual company. Not only that, but the actual job from the actual company in question represents something that I actually want to do — something that I was beginning to give up hope on. Something I'd given up hope on enough to apply to be a customer service monkey for British Gas — an opportunity which they were keen to pursue with me, but which I thankfully didn't follow up on. I don't see myself as a phone jocket. Largely because I fucking hate talking on the phone.

No, this new job, which I will refrain from posting too many details about until I've signed various contracts and officially accepted the position, will have me doing some writing in the games industry, though not as a journalist. It's a role at a software company, meaning I'll hopefully have the opportunity to be exposed to the process of game development as well as marketing. It's based in London, too, which is a mild pain in terms of accommodation prices, but quite exciting in that it's 1) closer to my friends who are still on the south coast 2) closer to my friends who now live in London and 3) it's London, and I've never lived in London before.

From a cursory examination of Rightmove, actually, the area of London that would be most practical for me to live for this job actually doesn't cost that much more than a shithole like Aldershot. Granted, in Aldershot you probably get a bigger room for your money, but given that I'm effectively "starting over" at level 1 with nothing but vendor trash gear on my back, I don't mind slumming it in a pokey little flat for a while. After all, the future's already looking brighter, so better things will inevitably be on the horizon.

This, then, represents pretty much all of the negative status effects I picked up over the last year and a bit being lifted. Now it's just a case of restoring HP (and finances), acquiring better gear (and somewhere to live) and then the path is clear to level 80.

Or, you know, something less geeky. Oh, sod off. I can express my good news however the hell I want.

So, then, that was today. I start my new job on July 4, so that will be a period fraught with both excitement and nervousness — but the good kind, rather than the "shit, everything is going wrong, how am I possibly ever going to get through this?" kind. Which is nice.

#oneaday Day 517: Social Peril II: The Periling

As a social network, Facebook is arguably becoming less meaningful — that is, from the perspective of encouraging meaningful interactions with one another. This, I feel, is in part due to how cluttered it is these days — cluttered with people, cluttered with businesses, cluttered with applications. I long for the simplicity of the site as it was when I first joined it, when it didn't even have a chat system and friend requests required you to indicate how you knew the person — kind of what LinkedIn does nowadays, only with people actually talking to each other instead of using phrases like "blueskying" and "monetization".

A fine example comes up if you look at the Facebook Page for any social game, ever. You can pick any random example and this will happen. Look at something the producers of the game say, then look at the community comments. You might have 25% meaningful discussion (a somewhat optimistic estimate — if the game is popular you can reduce that down to less than 5%) and 75% people just going "add me". This also happens on App Store reviews for "multiplayer" (and I use the term loosely) games.

It's not just that, though. Posts on Pages vaguely related to Xbox/PS3 will bring the fanboys for both camps out in force, ranting and raving at each other and not even addressing the point that was made in the original wall post — burying any meaningful discussion amidst the usual spray of bile, hatred and testosterone.

Beyond that, though, a lot of the trouble lies with the changing way people use Facebook nowadays. When it was a simplistic, app-free system, people used it to communicate. People would write a status, other people who knew the original person would comment. People might post a link or a photo, people would comment. Simple, effective. Now, though, with the fact that everyone and his dog has a Share to Facebook button, this simple clarity of communication has been almost completely lost. You get the occasional aberration where a topical post can bloom into an interesting discussion between friends, but soon enough it's lost in the never-ending cycle that is your News Feed, devaluing the interaction until it's gone, forgotten, meaningless.

The simple answer is, of course, to adapt. Realise that Facebook is not about permanence and the long-term, it's about the here, the now, the narcissistic. "This" is happening right now, so you share it. Here's a photo. Here's my new Bejeweled Blitz high score. I'm playing a game with farms in it. I took a quiz to determine which colour from the Dulux range I "am". PAY ATTENTION TO ME.

Facebook's new Messages system doesn't help, either. Muddling your chats in with your actual messages is a dumb idea, because the sort of thing you write in a message is typically lengthier than what you write in a chat. And then it all gets jumbled together, so if you had a message thread with some meaningful information in it followed by a chat with said person about how much you heard they like cock due to whoever just facejacked their profile, then it becomes nigh-on impossible to find anything useful.

I'm not too concerned about the whole thing, though, to be honest. Facebook does what I need it to for now, which is to allow me to share links to my articles and work to people who might be interested or might not have another means of finding out about them, and occasionally proving to be the most reliable means of contacting people. As such, I'll likely keep my profile there, but my usage of the platform is at a bare minimum these days, as I don't feel like it's really for me any more. Twitter, on the other hand, still does everything I need it to and still remains pretty much as pure and clear as it was the day I started using it. Let's hope it stays that way.

(In other news, I had a lovely weekend away, as you may have surmised from that last post. Thank you to Andie for making it happen!)

#oneaday Day 516: Away Game

Spending a weekend in markedly different surroundings to the place where you spend most of the rest of your week is an eminently worthwhile experience, particularly if you spend most of your week chained to a desk — whether that's in a working-from-home sort of situation or the daily grind at an office. Over the last few weeks (and probably months) I've been fortunate enough to be able to spend some time away from the environment I spend the working week in, and it's a healthy, positive experience.

The only frustrating thing about the whole shebang is the fact that most places I go away to are inevitably attached somehow to either my awesome girlfriend Andie, who currently lives 150 miles away from me; or to friends I left behind back in the Southampton area (about 120 miles away) when I was forced to depart last September.

In some senses, this is good, though, as it means I get completely out of the daily "grind", as it were, by going somewhere markedly different from the places I see every day. Even if I do go out while I'm back at home, it's inevitably to the same old places time after time — local shop, local supermarket, post office, local coffee house. And while I know Southampton and Winchester pretty well having spent the best part of 10 years living and working in the area, the fact I don't live there now is enough to keep them feeling fresh, pleasant and not "new" as such, but places I feel I can rediscover each time I visit.

Now, granted, Southampton's a bit of a shithole and if you want to do something on a Saturday night that isn't getting pissed (and, by extension, into a fight) or going to the cinema, there's actually really not a great deal to do — not in the town centre at least. But as I've said on several occasions in the past, it's a place in which I lay down some "roots" and even if I end up never moving back there to live — which is looking increasingly likely — it will always be if not a "home" then certainly a home away from home.

Winchester, on the other hand, is a place I'd return to in a flash given the opportunity. My favourite place I've ever lived was in Winchester. It was a gorgeous big fully-furnished flat with a dishwasher, heated towel rails and a dressing room off the main bedroom. The furniture provided was good quality, not the usual hand-me-down shite, and while I was there, even though I was working a soul-crushingly awful job in the secondary music classrooms of Hampshire, it was a haven I could return to of an evening and feel like I had come "home". Of course, as Sod's Law tends to go, this dream-come-true of accommodation was snatched up by the landlord, who rather inconsiderately wanted to give it to their daughter, so we ended up living in a nice-ish cottage that was unfortunately afflicted with a great deal of damp and mould, and smelled disconcertingly of gas in the living room.

I often wonder where I'm going to end up next. I hope it's somewhere good that I can lay down some roots once again and start afresh. For now, there are weekend escapes like the one I'm on now with Andie, and right this second, that's the best life has to offer, so I'm damn well going to enjoy it.

#oneaday Day 514: Looking Back

It's ironic, really, that one of the best things about living in The Future is the ability to recapture the past at will. While we may not have managed to nail the whole time travel thing just yet, despite our speculative fiction authors coming up with a number of potential solutions, technology provides the next best thing, which is to revive things from our past in our present.

There's lots of ways this happens. We have the pixel art movement, creating art from the graphics of 20 years ago. We have sites like Good Old Games celebrating, well, the good old games of the world. We have YouTube and its magical, ever-expanding collection of tat from your childhood which someone has lovingly gone to the effort of finding, digitising and putting on the Internet for all and sundry. (On a side note, the word "digitised" doesn't seem to be used much these days. I remember it used to be a word to denote excitement in the late 80s and early 90s — "this game has digitised speech!" "WOW!" etc.)

Is this healthy, though? Wikipedia (I know, I know, I don't have an actual dictionary to hand) describes nostalgia as "a yearning for the past, often in an idealised form". The rose-tinted spectacles syndrome. Nostalgia sees you thinking back to past experiences and thinking "God, that was awesome" with an implied "but I'm not sure I'd want to go back and do it again." If you can actually go back and do those things that inspired such nostalgia, does it lose its impact?

It varies. Sometimes old things really don't hold up well to close scrutiny. And sometimes they do. In the video game world, Ultima Underworld holds up a whole lot better than, say, anything on the Atari 8-bit computer. Granted, there's more than a few years between them, but they're both things that evoke a feeling of nostalgia in people who knew them first time around — and they're both things that you can recapture the feeling of, either through an emulator in the case of the Atari computers (or indeed finding a working model on eBay) or in the cast of Ultima Underworld, through Good Old Games, which has very graciously recently made both games available once again after a very long time.

The same is true of non-gaming experiences, of course. Things that you thought were delicious and tasty in your youth might taste like crap now because your palate is more refined. Having a farting competition on the school field might not hold the same appeal. Doodling cocks on exercise books might cease to be amusing. (Though I doubt it. If I ever get to that stage, kindly kill me.)

A lot of it is due to your own attitude towards the past, of course. If you're an inherently nostalgic person, then you'll be predisposed to enjoy rediscovering old things, whether this is an old video game, a diary you wrote when you were twelve or a CD you used to listen to on repeat over and over and over. But some people prefer to move on, always pushing forward, leaving the past behind, preferring to let bygones be bygones. They get to enjoy the latest, the greatest, the biggest, the best. But they never get to do the things that once made them happy again. That's kinda sad.

You can probably guess which category I fall into. If you're having trouble, the fact that I replaced my Windows "busy" cursors with the pixelated monochrome bee cursor from the Atari ST today should make it abundantly clear.

#oneaday Day 513: Just Cut It Out

The world — particularly the online world — is proving particularly infuriating of late, what with childish hacker collective LulzSec harassing the Internet and now companies via phone, and the earlier news that 2K Games unceremoniously fired their PR company for its head honcho's passionate outburst of frustration at the overly-negative reviews of Duke Nukem Forever. (Yes, he was a tit to talk about blacklisting publications in public. Yes, it likely goes on anyway. But I kind of understand where he's coming from — to have your job being to show genuine (or at least genuine-seeming) enthusiasm for a product then to see the world unceremoniously take a large and steaming dump over it and then revel in how "clever" they're all being with their scathingness must be an awful feeling.)

It's times like this that it's easy to feel like you miss that simpler time when "The Internet" only existed when you plugged it in and endured listening to that horrendous noise of a modem connecting. (Weeeeeeeee-skkrrrrrroooooooo!!!! BEEEOOOOOOWWWWWWWWW KHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH FFFFFFFKKKKKKKHHHHHHHHHHHHH.) But now the Internet is always there, and you can't, it seems, get away from the bad things.

This is, in some ways, a good thing, as everyone is more aware of things that are going on thanks to Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and all manner of other services. But in other ways, it's a bad thing — I recall around the time of the most recent major natural disasters that many commented a feeling of "disaster fatigue" brought about by the constant rolling coverage on TV and the constant stream of articles on the Internet. In many ways, having constant coverage spread out over a course of hours, days or even weeks reduces the impact of something happening — and as a result, the media feels the need to ram it down our throats even more, and so on and so on and so on. It also happens with reality TV shows, with the media going X-Factor/BGT/Big Brother/I'm A Cunt, Please Shoot Me crazy for the few weeks each of those respective shows is cluttering up the airwaves with its offensive stench until everyone is absolutely sick to death of seeing whatever Generic Talentless "Celebrity" X has had for lunch today.

Such is, presumably, the case with LulzSec. They hack someone and highlight their security flaws — that makes a point. But now it's just a case of "HAY WE GONNA KEEP DOING THIS CAUSE IT'S FUNNY". Whatever point they may have once been trying to make, it has been lost amidst some grade-A cuntishness of the highest order. And the frustrating thing — not to mention the thing they're probably enjoying the most — is that the average person, annoyed, upset and frustrated with them, is absolutely impotent, with nothing they can do about it. Of course, you can try reporting it to the Internet Crime Complaint Center, but who's to know if they'll be able to do anything about it?

I suppose the way to deal with it is to follow the advice your primary school teachers gave you when dealing with bullies — just ignore them and they'll stop.

But will they? Perhaps a punch in the testicles will work just as well — perhaps even quicker.

#oneaday Day 511: Your Opinion is Valid, Unless It's Wrong

The few days since Duke Nukem Forever has been released have been interesting ones, from the perspective of looking at reactions to it, if nothing else. As I mentioned the other day, I've been playing the PC version and enjoying it a great deal. It's a thoroughly silly game full of ridiculous diversions, some old-school shooting coupled with some new-school sensibilities.

The combination doesn't always quite work, but to call it a "broken mess" and a "terrible game" as some people are doing seems a bit harsh, particularly when you bear the game's troubled history into account.

But I'm not going to go off on one defending Duke Nukem. Instead, what I will ponder is how many people will avoid playing it altogether based on the negative buzz surrounding it? And more to the point, how many people will pass up the PC version, which is significantly more technically competent than the apparently-dodgy console ports, based solely on reviews — pretty much all of which I've seen have been based on the console versions?

I picked up Duke Nukem because it's a piece of gaming history — the world's most notorious piece of vapourware. I enjoyed Duke Nukem 3D but wasn't obsessed with it or anything — it was simply an enjoyable game. For its sequel to come so many years later after it looking like it was never going to arrive at all? That's kind of cool — like, as one person on Rock Paper Shotgun pointed out earlier, witnessing an unfinished novel, symphony, play, whatever that was completed posthumously. I'm by no means saying Duke Nukem Forever is a work of art — it really isn't — but I'm also saying that it's an interesting curiosity that I fear people will pass by completely purely because the opinion-formers of the world say they should.

Perhaps they won't, though. Perhaps the game will drop to a bargain price at some point in the near future and people will be inclined to pick it up out of sheer curiosity. I'll be pleased if that happens, for even if you end up hating the game, I believe that the sheer amount of history that this title has is worth the price of admission alone. As many have pointed out, you can practically see where George Broussard insisted the team take the game back to the drawing board time after time after time — it's manifested itself in a game that's trying to be the biggest, the best, the greatest at everything it does and not really achieving it — but what it does achieve is provide one of the most varied experiences you'll ever have in a first-person shooter. One minute you'll be driving a remote-control car through a burning casino. The next you might be scaling the outside of a tower that has alien tentacles wrapped around it. The next you may be deep underground, exploring a genuinely unpleasant and disturbing level where you witness first-hand exactly what the aliens are doing to the "babes". And the next, you might be wandering around a strip club, looking for popcorn, a vibrator and a condom.

So if you've been put off by the early reviews of Duke Nukem Forever but have always been intrigued by the idea, I'd encourage you to check it out. Maybe not while it's full price if you're not happy with that idea, but certainly once it drops in price. It's an interesting and genuinely fun game despite its flaws, and it also has a simplistic but excellently entertaining multiplayer mode which is being rather unfairly dismissed by much of the media.

Shake it, baby. Never thought Duke Nukem Forever would have serious potential to become Squadron of Shame material.

#oneaday Day 509: Ham and Jam and...

Today I went to see the musical Spamalot. That may be the sort of way that a primary school child starts their school camp diary (assuming part of said school camp involved going to see Spamalot, which would immediately make it much better than my school camp) but at least it's factually accurate — today I did indeed go and see Spamalot.

Spamalot is, of course, the musical based loosely on Monty Python and the Holy Grail, one of the most irritatingly-oft-quoted movies of all time. The show plays up on this by incorporating a number of the movie's most memorable quotes whilst wrapping it in an all new crispy coating of musical theatre.

The production we saw today featured Phill Jupitus as King Arthur. I've not seen him on stage before but I've always been a fan of him on shows such as Never Mind the Buzzcocks, and his likeable persona brought a lot to the character of Arthur — particularly as there was a bit of inadvertent corpsing on several occasions, evidence that the show is likely coming towards the end of its run.

The show itself is great. My lovely ladyfriend introduced me to the soundtrack a few weeks back and I found myself returning to it on Spotify regularly, so we decided to check it out. The stage show in the UK is somewhat different from the US-centric soundtrack — the song about never succeeding on Broadway if you don't have any Jews is conspicuously absent, replaced by the not-so-subtle "you'll never succeed in showbiz if you don't have any stars".

The cast were good and played their parts with appropriate levels of aplomb. And, in the tradition of all good tongue-in-cheek musicals, the show succeeds because it's not only an excellent spoof of the musical genre in general, it's also a good musical, with some excellently memorable tunes, good pacing and a suitably huge-sounding finale.

So, basically, if you get the opportunity to go and see Spamalot, then you should. It's rather good.

#oneaday Day 156: PrE3

LOS ANGELES, June 06, 2011 — GeneriCon is today proud to announce its announcement of an announcement at the world's largest electronic entertainment expo — E3! The announcement is for a top secret project that will not be revealed at E3, but the announcement will not reveal what that project is — rather, it will reveal when to expect the announcement of the project!

"I'm tremendously excited about this announcement," said Papa Bear, CEO of GeneriCon. "Our 15 years of experience at teasing the industry is sure to pay off this E3 when we build up to absolutely nothing of any substance whatsoever. They'll be begging for more by the time we're finished — but they're not going to get it!"

GeneriCon's announcement ceremony will feature a special appearance by the Cirque de la Lune, a fraternity of performing minstrels from Paragon City who have not yet realized that they are fictional constructs born from the imagination of massively multiplayer online RPG players. Supporting Cirque de la Lune will be a troupe of performing badgers and the worlds most synchronized brigade of elephants.

"The practice of announcing a new project at E3 is passé," said Julian Ivanov, VP of Commercial, Corporate and Certifiable Communications. "We are revolutionizing the practice of announcements. After this E3, people will be wondering whether they should even bother attending the show in the first place, so little will actually be revealed on the show floor. But the answer is simple, of course — come to see our elephants."

Visit GeneriCon's booth on the show floor, booth number 6969, to see absolutely nothing whatsoever. Private media showings, including exclusive reveals, can be arranged by emailing suckitup@genericon.com.

ABOUT GENERICON

Founded in 1996 by the son of an advertising legend and a Belgian, GeneriCon has since proven itself to be a world leader in the field of PR and marketing teasers as well as having the highest staff turnover of any company in history. Despite ample coverage from the press, consumers have not yet noticed that the company is yet to release an actual product onto the market.

CAUTIONARY NOTE REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

From time to time, GeneriCon may use statements such as "will", "might", "should", "hope to", "want to", "intend to", "will possibly", "maybe might", "probably", "definitely will", "definitely won't", "possibly will", "almost certainly will", "absolutely, positively, totally will", "really wish we could", "have extremely good intentions to", or "think we might just". These statements should not be taken as official confirmation of an intent to do anything at all and, in fact, it's probably safer if you just ignore them altogether, just like you're ignoring this whole paragraph because it waffles on forever and ever and doesn't really make any sense. GeneriCon reserves the right to decline all knowledge of the use of any forward-looking statements at any time, even if they were on the record and appear on audio or visual evidence, because you probably just made it up because that's what journalists do, isn't it? Any use of forward-looking statements is not admissible in a court of law and is not an admission of liability should someone come to injury as a result of waiting for a non-existent product. All rights reserved, except the ones which might cost us money.

#oneaday Day 155: Shop Shop

Shopping's a bit rubbish in the 21st century, isn't it? You have to drive all the way somewhere, pay a billion pounds to park and then walk around a bunch of shops that don't necessarily have the thing you're looking for in the first place and you just know that you should have phoned ahead to see if they had that thing and you didn't and blah.

In the age of the Internet, of course, there's really very little need to go out to the shops. Internet stores are much cheaper, don't require you to interact with sullen shop assistants (who are probably just as non-enthused about interacting with you as you with them) and have a selection of everything in the world. (You can also get pornography shipped to you in discreet, plain packaging as opposed to a plastic bag proudly emblazoned with "Bounty Bob's Big House o' Porn" on the side of it.)

Very little need, of course, but for one thing: you still can't beat the convenience of actually walking into a shop, handing over some cash (or your plastic of choice) and walking out of there with an item. The quickest somewhere like Amazon can get stuff to you is the next day, which is pretty good going, but still not quite as good as thinking "I want that thing" and being able to go and get that thing immediately. (Also, if Amazon decide to ship your shit through Home Delivery Network, you can forget about seeing it for at least a week. Free Super Saver Delivery is free for a reason.)

Going to the actual shops can be a social event, though. Some people enjoy the experience of wandering around small, cramped spaces that have never heard of air conditioning, rummaging through thirty-seven almost-identical products until they irritably state that it's just not right and go off to have a half-caff frappucino mocha with extra foam.

And then there's the shops which are specifically designed to be hands-on. You can order an iPad from the Apple website, sure, but you can go in and fiddle with one before handing over your money if you walk into an Apple Store. That's kind of cool, and in an era where more and more sales are moving online, it's sometimes difficult to imagine why more "brick and mortar" (ugh, hate that expression) stores aren't moving to a more interactive system. GAME, for example, would be awesome if you could pick up a game you were curious about, try it out for a few minutes and make your mind up. Better than buying something whose pack art looked great/had massive tits on it and discovering that it's actually a load of old bollocks when you get home. Of course, this plan is inherently flawed by the fact that if you let people sit and play games in your store, they will sit and play games in your store. All day. Just ask anyone who works in an Apple Store.

#oneaday Day 153: Things That Make No Logical Sense But Are Clearly True: Food Edition

Life brings with it a number of learning experiences, and you store these pieces of information away in your dome-like for future reference, ready for subconscious recall at any available opportunity. Some of these pieces of information are, of course, complete nonsense and have absolutely no basis in scientific fact, but you become convinced of them anyway.

And so it is that you, like me, may have come to believe such rubbish as the following facts, which are clearly true. And all food-related, oddly.

Coke tastes better in a can.

It just does. Cans get colder than bottles and stay colder longer than bottles. Plus something about the metal particles makes the Coke taste better than the plastic particles of a bottle. There are people who will say that a glass bottle is the best way to enjoy a Coke, but they are wrong.

Sandwiches taste better when cut into triangles, unless they are bacon sandwiches.

This is also true. Eat a sandwich that has not been cut in any way and it tastes clearly inferior to triangular sandwiches. And don't even get me started on people who cut rectangular sandwiches. There's nothing even a little bit right about that.

Bacon sandwiches taste better when cut into small squares.

The exception to the sandwich rule is the bacon sandwich rule. Try it. Next time you have a bacon butty, cut it into quarters and you'll see that it's clearly better.

McDonalds chips taste better when consumed by the handful.

Milk tastes better swigged from the bottle.

As everyone (who enjoys milk) well knows, having an illicit glug from the bottle is far nicer than pouring out a glass. I fear that some of the Coke Science may be coming into play here.

It's impossible to make a good cup of coffee for yourself.

Make yourself a coffee. Taste it. Put up with it because it's "all right". Now get someone else to make you a coffee. Taste it. Enjoy it. Accept their making you a coffee that one time as acceptance of a non-verbal contract to make you a coffee whenever you want.

Tea only tastes of something if you believe in it.

I don't believe in tea, therefore it tastes like hot water — particularly the herbal teas. They smell great, but I never believe that they're going to taste of anything, so they don't.

Ketchup and HP sauce are opposites, and if they touch each other they will spontaneously combust.

What other reason could people possibly have for putting dollops of each respective sauce on opposite sides of the plate?

You are not allowed to have soup on a hot day.

It's not that you don't want soup on a hot day, your brain tells you that you must not have soup on a hot day.

If a piece of food you don't like touches a piece of food you do like, the food you do like is forever tainted.

This one is actually true. I hate onion — particularly raw onion. Even the slightest hint of a taste of it makes me retch. This includes if a salad once had raw onion on it and said raw onion has since been removed. It leaves a flavour residue that makes anything the onion once touched completely unpalatable.

Cheese sauce can be used as the strongest adhesive known to man.

If you've ever burnt cheese sauce onto a saucepan, you'll know that this is also true.

The most exotic-sounding sandwich on the menu is always the best.

This one is, unfortunately, not always true. Many's the time I've had a chicken tikka sandwich hoping for a gorgeous curried revelation and walked away disappointed, wishing I'd gone for the tuna and sweetcorn.

The dessert that mentions chocolate the most times is the best.

Also not always true, since too much chocolate can lead to becoming completely gummed up with sticky, gooey goodness. And while that can be fun, it can also lead to feeling a bit sick. And no-one likes feeling a bit sick.

If you don't have some sort of sauce on a kebab, you are Doing it Wrong.

Because why on Earth would you eat that shit if it wasn't covered in chilli sauce that can strip paint, or garlic sauce so strong it can be used as insect repellent?