Throughout most people's lives, there are certain things that give them comfort. Certain things that they know they can always turn to. Certain things that are evergreen and never seem to lose their appeal, regardless of how long they've been in your life. It's nice to have things like this, because it reminds you that however chaotic life in general might seem, there will always be a few constants out there that will keep you happy.
I have a few of these things. One of these, as you may have deduced by now, is Borderlands. One of last year's sleeper hits, Borderlands was a winning combination of first-person shooter and Diablo-esque loot whoring action RPG. A whole bunch of people bought it on its release, which is good. But how many of those people 1) finished it and 2) are still playing it now?
I enjoy Borderlands because it's entertainment you can "dip" into. It doesn't have a particularly demanding story. Some might say the story is something of an afterthought. But that's not important. In fact, that's what makes it so "dip-friendly", if that's even a term. Because you never feel like you've lost the plot (literally) and there's always something in the mission log to go and do, it can be months between play sessions and you can still have a good time with it regardless. I still haven't finished the game with a single character, but I do enjoy going back to it time and time again, whether it's solo, with a split-screen partner or with some companions on Xbox LIVE. In fact, I've played it far too little online, as it's great fun in multiplayer. But for me at least, it's evergreen entertainment. I can happily go back to it. If you still have a copy, hit me up. I have a level 31 Siren just waiting to show you a good time.
The same is true for Geometry Wars 2. Although the Squadron of Shame's battle for high score supremacy is long over, with me claiming the top spot in everything except the Waves and Pacifism modes, it's still a game I come back to time and time again, because it's low-maintenance entertainment. And it has a kicking soundtrack. Bizarre even released an awesome megamix MP3 of it that you can pick up here.
Besides games, my other choices are TV shows, because they're short enough to sit down and watch with dinner without feeling like you're committing several hours of time to, and because they're comfortably familiar. In particular, I've lost count of the number of times that I've watched Black Books and Spaced. Spaced in particular, for me, represents possibly the very best of British television. It's clever, it's funny, it's well-written and above all, it's evergreen. It's still just as relevant today as it is now, though watching it as a slightly older person changes my perspective on it somewhat. Black Books, on the other hand, represents the other extreme of what British comedy does well – the bizarre and the uncanny. Black Books makes absolutely no sense and thus, going by past experience, it utterly confuses Americans. Admittedly I base this assumption on the fact that my brother found it really funny and my sister-in-law didn't get it at all, so it may be a somewhat hasty conclusion. But if you want to switch your brain off and enjoy some purely comic situations, there's few things that will beat it.
As you can probably imagine, in recent weeks I've been turning quite a lot to some of these pieces of evergreen entertainment to bring me some comfort. Of course, some of them have memories attached to them. But many of the memories attached to them are even older than those ones that are painful. They've been the constant presence in my life, and that brings me comfort.
What are some of your evergreens?
As a musician and someone who actually recognises good singing when he hears it, there is no sound more loathsome to me than the sound of football chanting, except possibly that horrible sound that polystyrene makes when you scrape it against something – ugh, it gives me goosebumps (in a bad way) just thinking about it. But yes. Hearing some drunken twats shouting "EN-GUH-LUHND" in a discordant manner is not musical. Nor does it make me particularly inclined to think that Enguhluhnd is a place to be especially proud of.
Police are going around to all pubs andclubs saying we cant wear our england tops for the footie and we havetotake our england flags down as it is offending ppl that aren't fromengland !!now im NOT RACIST..BUT this is taking the piss!! THIS ISENGLAND & we need to make a stand!!! would u remove ur turban if itoffended me??? we need to stick together repost this as ur status andmake ur stand!!!! ENGLAND !
Sometimes you just want a quiet drink. Sometimes you want to chill out with friends. But at World Cup time, you try finding a pub that isn't filled with 1) braying idiots and 2) a giant TV showing a match… even the ones that England aren't involved with. It's not easy. There are some out there, sure, but they're not always easy to find. And should you find yourself stumbling into a pub which is showing the football at the time… well, I certainly find it a threatening environment. Light-hearted banter that "oooh, there'll be riots if England lose" doesn't help matters.
I hate hate hate it when people tell me what I should be excited about. I feel like a tool when I do any sort of "celebration" at the best of times, so there's no way I'm going to make a twat of myself in front of the general public by trying to fit in with one of the communal bellows when one of the players does something that is apparently good. I feel like a fraud if I try (and I've tried) – so I'd rather not bother. I'd rather not be in that situation in the first place at all, thanks. But if I am forced to watch a football match, I'd much rather sit quietly with my drink and ignore what's going on as much as possible, preferably with anyone who feels the same way.
Last of all, I really can't get excited about something done by people I don't have any interest in or even respect. I hate footballers. They're overpaid prima donnas who can kick a ball around and get paid inordinately huge amounts of cash for it. And they are the most boring people on the planet. I can't watch a footballer being interviewed. I have to switch over, because their droning voices and complete lack of personality make me want to summon a dimensional portal in my TV in order to let me slap them in the face until they wake up from their doziness.
So not satisfied with a logo which looks like 
"Well sure, Captain Obvious," I hear you say. "What else is new? Gordon Ramsay swears a lot? Brian Blessed is a bit shouty? Graham Norton is gay?"
Remember: eight- and nine-year olds. Do they really need to know terminology like "learning objective" and "success criteria"? I am yet to meet a child who actually knows why they write down the learning objective and success criteria other than "it's the stuff we copy at the start of the work, innit". The sole purpose for it is so when the inspectors come to play that the teachers can point proudly at the various learning objectives and say "Look! They've done this!".
Hollywood can take full responsibility for this one, since almost any movie involving a car crash inevitably ends with one or both of the cars exploding into a ball of flames while our intrepid hero manages to get out just in time. So when I was being driven to a piano lesson by my mother one night, and a car misjudging a peculiar junction bumped into the front of our car at less than 20mph (hardcore, right?) I was terribly surprised to not suddenly be engulfed in flames and smoke and be battling for my life. Pleasantly surprised, I might add – even more so by the fact that we could drive off after the accident, because the second thing I assumed about car accidents at the time was that they caused your car to immediately die. However non-severe the accident was. Scrape a lamp-post? Uh-oh, better start walking!
I am genuinely quite paranoid about this to this day – not unreasonably I feel, as we're taught quite early on that cars run on quite flammable materials and as such probably shouldn't be in close contact with anything that is, you know, on fire. To this day, any litterbug smoker flinging their fag-ends out of their window hasn't been successful in detonating my car behind them but surely it's only a matter of time.
It probably hasn't escaped your notice that three out of the three irrational fears so far have involved explosions. I don't have a particular explosion phobia – although like most people, it's not something I would choose to stand next to – but it occurs to me that no-one gives you a particular education in the things which do and do not cause explosions. This is clearly a failing of the current education system and should be rectified with a new section of the National Curriculum immediately.
Okay, sometimes this is true. If you saw Jack Bauer storming a hotel you'd stayed at, that would be pretty cool. But having suffered through many, many episodes of pensioner-based "sitcom" (and I use the term loosely) Last of the Summer Wine when I was little, and then having visited Holmfirth, the Yorkshire village where it is set, I can state with some confidence that this is simply not the case. In fact, I recall being rather disappointed when I discovered that the café in the series was actually a hairdressers in reality. Oh, and the programme still wasn't funny.
Bearded light-entertainment twat Noel Edmonds (now in charge of the utterly pointless Deal or No Deal) used to have a show on Saturday evenings called Noel's House Party. It was a variety show of the type you don't really get that much any more, unless there's some sort of charity gig like Comic Relief or Children in Need going on in which case they draw the format out over the course of approximately fifteen hours. One of the segments on the show was called Gotcha, where Noel would look right at the screen and start talking, then click his fingers and suddenly on everyone's TV screens, there was a family sitting together on their sofa looking all "OMG!" while Noel was all "LOL!" and the audience was like "ROFL!"
People who comment first on things should be applauded for their tenacity. Assuming they have anything worthwhile to say. However, unfortunately, the sort of person who enjoys pointing out the fact they are the first to comment on something rarely has anything useful to say. This then has the knock-on effect of causing the following commenters to assume that the thing that has been posted is the sort of thing only enjoyed by twats and, by extension, is not something over which a reasonable, thought-provoking or entertaining discussion might take place. Please see what you can do to stop this happening.
The immediacy with which information is available on you is astounding. During the last paragraph, I was able to quickly look up the word "tenacity" to ensure it was, in fact, the correct word I was thinking of. (It was.) However, this does not mean that more lengthy prose no longer has a place in society. Whether on a message board, a blog post, an online news article or a Wikipedia article, the saying "less is more" is not always true. Consider these two sentences: "Pete is a dude." and "Pete is an awesome dude who likes video games and music, and has also recently taken to punctuating his blog posts with MS Paint stickmen representations of himself and numerous other anonymous people." Which of the two sentences tells you more about Pete?
Laughter is the best medicine, but it is not punctuation. We already have some perfectly good punctuation marks to use. Here is one: a colon. And a full stop. And oh look – a dash! And an exclamation mark. But what about a question mark? Or some sort of slash/"quotation marks" combination? All of these things are fine and serve to make our written communication more clear.
I've bought things in the past. I once bought a copy of Oasis' first album Definitely Maybe the day before their second album (What's the Story) Morning Glory? came out. I didn't know any better at the time, as I was just getting into popular music, but I wasn't annoyed, because Definitely Maybe is a good album too. I was quite impressed that my friends at the time didn't feel the need to take the piss out of me for this, because they too knew that Definitely Maybe was still a worthwhile purchase even though the next album was on the way.
Finally, Internet, I believe that one of your most exciting features that you told everyone about when you first appeared on the scene was the ability to bring the whole world closer together. Terms like "information superhighway" and "global village" were coined for us to all imagine one big happy family holding hands and enjoying things together.