1555: Rebels Against the God

Having finished To Love-Ru a few days ago, I decided to jump into another show I’d heard of but didn’t know much about: Angel Beats!, a show from P.A. Works and Aniplex, with a story and character design from two members of Key, the folks behind Clannad. (I mention this because the latter aspect is particularly noticeable; the show has the same gorgeous, well-animated style as Clannad, though thematically it’s rather different.)

I’m only three episodes in so far but I’m very interested to see more already simply because the premise is so unusual. Unfolding in the afterlife, the show follows the exploits of a group who call themselves the SSS — a group of people who are attempting to resist a non-specific “god” to prevent themselves from being “obliterated” and subsequently reincarnated. Each of the characters clearly has their own story to tell about how they died and why they don’t want to give up and accept their fate; three episodes in, we’ve already seen a couple of them, and I predict there will be quite a few tearjerking scenes before the end.

Like Clannad, though, Angel Beats! doesn’t rely purely on wringing out your tear ducts until you can’t cry any more. In fact, even more so than Clannad, there’s a heavy dose of humour to the proceedings, and it’s often rather black in nature. In the second episode, for example, the main cast are attempting to find their way to a hidden base from which they can procure weapons and supplies for their fight against what appears to be God’s representative, an emotionless young girl called Angel who constantly thwarts them with her mysterious, seemingly supernatural powers. Along the way, it becomes apparent that the “anti-Angel traps” that had been set along the route have been activated, and one by one the group gets picked off in a series of gruesome manners. One guy gets crushed by a rock; another drowns; another is sliced to ribbons by being too big and muscular to duck under an arrangement of laser beams. In most shows, this sequence of events would be a horrifying tragedy, but since all the characters in Angel Beats! are inhabitants of the afterlife, we’re quickly reminded that something that would kill you in reality will merely inconvenience you for a few minutes if you’re already dead. I sense this is something that’s going to come around again in the future.

One of the things I’m enjoying about the show so far is how it juxtaposes darkly humorous sections like the aforementioned — trust me, it is funny despite all the violence — with sections that are just plain dark. The sequence where leading lady Yuri explains her regrets from the latter days of her life is utterly heartbreaking, for example, as is the story of how songstress Iwasawa shuffled off the mortal coil and found herself in the afterlife. I’m pretty certain that the rest of the cast will have a similar tale to tell — with the final story undoubtedly being reserved for the currently amnesiac male protagonist, who is thoroughly confused by the whole situation he finds himself in.

The show’s beautifully presented; aside from the aforementioned lovely art and glorious animation, the soundtrack is excellent, too. There’s been heavy use of diegetic music in the episodes I’ve seen so far, with the lyrics often being relevant either to the specific situation the gang finds themselves in, or their overall situation in the afterlife. It can sometimes be a challenge to keep up with the two sets of subtitles running at once — one for the music, one for the dialogue — but it’s worth attempting. (It’s also nothing compared to the bizarre way the show handles teasers for the next episode: short clips from the episode of characters talking, all overlaid on top of each other at a more and more frantic pace until you can’t possibly take any more.)

So that’s that. At three episodes in I’m hesitant to say too much more at this juncture, but I’ve very much enjoyed what I’ve seen so far and am looking forward to watching more. I’m sure I’ll have further thoughts when I have a few more episodes under my belt.

1552: An American Workplace

Finally reached the end of the American incarnation of The Office today, and I was very pleased with how it all wrapped itself up. I was very pleasantly surprised with the series as a whole, in fact — though the early stages of the first series where it was literally nothing more than a word-for-word remake of the English version were… not poor, but disappointing; and the latter part of the complete run did perhaps drag on a little longer than it needed to. Still, the finale was good, and the nine seasons of episodes meant that by the end you have a very strong understanding of all the characters involved.

I liked the balance it struck between some genuinely touching stories and somewhat formulaic character comedy. Many of the characters in the show almost had a “catchphrase” — not literally, but an iconic means of behaving — but the show, on the whole, managed to ensure that these party tricks weren’t used so much that the people using them became one-dimensional joke machines. Angela’s prim and proper attitude was subverted by what happened to her in the later seasons with regard to her relationships, for example, while the seemingly alcoholic Meredith points out in the last episode that the side of her captured on film — the side that drank too much, frequently got her tits out and behaved completely inappropriately — was only part of the entire picture.

And this was part of the point, really. As a spoof “docudrama”, both the English and American versions of The Office play with the idea that it’s possible to steer a narrative that you have no external influence on through careful, selective editing and manipulation after the fact. It’s a common trick in reality TV; some shows even supposedly have disclaimers that you may not be portrayed entirely accurately if you appear on them, because the footage will be edited to fit the “script” rather than to give a truthful picture of what actually happened.

In the case of The Office, of course, the whole thing was scripted and planned out from start to finish, and it was, at times, hard to forget that side of things. Jim and Pam’s romance was a little too perfect at times — even with the several pieces of tension introduced in the final season. Similarly, characters such as Dwight, Erin and Andy were almost too much of a caricature to be truly “believable” at times; this certainly didn’t hurt the show if you treated it as an ongoing comedy drama rather than attempting to suspend your disbelief and treat it as an ongoing documentary, but it did lose a little of the magic that the English original had.

That said, thinking back to the English original version, David Brent was an obvious caricature that, on many occasions, behaved far too ridiculously to be “believable” as a real person. The difference is that alongside his obvious nonsense, everything else was a lot more understated. The Tim and Dawn possible romance was constantly left dangling — something the American version simply couldn’t do with the considerably larger number of episodes it boasted — and even when it seemed to “wrap things up” had a certain degree of ambiguity about it. Not so much with Jim and Pam — though again, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing; Jim and Pam’s relationship and how they overcame their difficulties and stuck together was a pleasantly heartwarming tale when all’s said and done.

On the whole, then, I really enjoyed the whole series, and the last couple of episodes were an excellent finale to the entire run. It’s a very distinct beast from the English original — I’m not sure if it’s better overall, but it certainly managed to maintain our attention for nine seasons of twentysomething episodes each rather than the original’s two seasons of six episodes each.

It’s a good watch, then; less dependent on outright uncomfortable comedy than the British original, and more focus on slow, gradual character development over time. The whole run could have possibly stood to be a couple of seasons shorter — things dragged a little in the middle — but it started and finished very strong, and I’m very glad I took the time to watch it from start to finish.

The question is, then, what’s next?

1550: Alpen Sponsors Characters on Dave

It’s been a while since I talked about how shit adverts are, so let’s talk about how shit adverts are. Or, more accurately, how shit those annoying “bumpers” or whatever they’re called before and after every ad break on a particular channel are.

I’m thinking of two specific examples here, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a good one, even thinking years back. Remember the annoying girls frantically scrabbling around with a hammer and a bowl of popcorn before Friends came on? I don’t think I can ever remember what that was fo– wait, Wella Experience, so I guess it did its job to a certain extent. Or did it? Annoying girls frantically scrabbling around with a hammer and a bowl of popcorn before Friends came on didn’t make me want to purchase any of Wella’s Experience products, whatever the hell they were. No; it made me irritable, and it made me fast-forward the moment the screen faded for the ads whenever I watched the episodes on video, which is how I typically ended up watching Friends.

The two specific examples I’m thinking of from 2014 are both from the channel Dave, it of the perpetual Top Gear, QI and Mock the Week reruns. The first is for Admiral multi-car insurance, and the second is for Alpen.

They’re both shit, and not just because they’re repetitive — although by God they’re both repetitive as fuck when they’re repeated a considerable number of times every evening — and they’re both shit for the same reason: they don’t make any sense whatsoever.

Take the Admiral ones. Here’s one. (Actually, these are a little different from the ones that air on TV, but these are the ones that Admiral has inexplicably chosen to upload to their YouTube account.)

And another.

They appear to be attempting to make a catchphrase out of “ooh, that’s primetime!” because, you see, they accompany “primetime” shows on Dave. Trouble is, that doesn’t make any sense. “That’s primetime!” isn’t something people say, and it’s not something you can force people to say. Not to mention the fact that the ads don’t have anything whatsoever to do with what they’re supposedly advertising — multi-car insurance. And no, saying the words “multi-car insurance!” during the advert when something completely incongruous is going on is not advertising multi-car insurance. Like the annoying Wella girls, these ads make me less inclined to ever make use of Admiral’s services.

Then comes Alpen, who have much the same problem. Alpen, as the campaign goes, sponsors “characters on Dave”, or in other words, the shows that are on in the mid-to-late evening and typically involve recognisable, well-known comedians.

A month or so ago, Alpen’s campaign made a reasonable amount of sense. There was a dude tramping around his alpine apartment eating porridge. Geoffrey Palmer said “porridge full of character”, then there was a close-up of the porridge. Fair enough.

Now, however, there’s a bearded bloke who waffles on some idiotic nonsense about what he thinks characters “are” (“Characters have eyes in the back of their head! Hello, mountains!” — he’s standing in front of a window with a view over some mountains), then Geoffrey Palmer says “Alpen sponsors characters on Dave” with a rather worn-out voice, as if he knows what he’s being asked to do is utterly stupid. And no porridge, full of character or no. (Unfortunately there’s no videos of these sequences easily available. Sort it out, YouTube!)

I just don’t understand why or how someone signed off on these. Both the Admiral and the Alpen ads are clearly supposed to be funny, but they’re also obviously composed by people who have absolutely no idea how to write comedy and thus have absolutely no business whatever writing comedy. Or attempting to, anyway.

Anyway, yes. That’s what I’ve been thinking about this evening. What a happy and exciting life I lead, no?

1545: Changing Communication

I’m trying to make a conscious effort to tone down the effect the Internet has had on the way I communicate over time. This may sound like a peculiar thing to say, given that the majority of the communication I engage in on a daily basis is via the Internet, but just recently a number of things have really started to bug me about the way people talk to one another online, and I simply want to make sure that I’m not a part of it and thus, perhaps, inadvertently annoying someone else.

I think the chief thing I want to make sure I avoid is excessive hyperbole. Most people who use social media have been guilty of this at some point — posting a link to a mildly amusing cat video and declaring “Shut the Internet down. We’re done.” or “This is the best thing ever!” or “There are no words.” or… I could go on, but I won’t. You get the idea.

Declaring things “the best thing ever” or along those lines is excessive hyperbole. It devalues that phrase “the best thing ever” if everything is the best thing ever, and the other examples are just putting undue pressure on something that was probably designed to be a throwaway joke to perform and be somehow amazing.

Particularly gross examples of excessive hyperbole come in the form of headlines from sites like Buzzfeed, Upworthy and their numerous imitators. Inevitably conversational in tone but capitalised excessively So They Look Like This And You Won’t Believe What Happened Next, these headlines, on an almost hourly basis, promise laughter until you evacuate your bowels, crying until your eyes shrivel up and stories so heartwarming you’ll cook yourself from the inside. And they’re rarely anything special; at best, they’re sob stories deliberately designed to emotionally manipulate the reader; at worst, they’re pointless nonsense deliberately designed in an attempt to make them “go viral”.

Excessive hyperbole can spill over into discourse, too, and it frequently does. I’ve lost count of the number of times things have been described as “toxic” over the last year or two, when in fact this is, in many cases, an exaggeration. (Well, of course it is; if it was literally toxic then it would kill anyone involved.) And once you jump onto your high horse and brand something as “toxic” there’s really nowhere to go from there; the people who disagree will disagree forcefully because you were forceful in the first place, while the people who agree will look like wet lettuces if they decide to come in with a “Well, I wouldn’t say toxic, but…”. Thus online discourse frequently descends into who can be the most hyperbolic the loudest or the most often, and the quality of discussion suffers enormously as a result.

Last time I wrote about this sort of thing I attracted commenters accusing me of something called “tone policing”, which is where you distract attention away from the core argument that someone is trying to make by focusing on the way they are making it rather than the content. And that, perhaps, is something that people including myself do do, but if it’s becoming an issue then perhaps the people who are getting “tone policed” should consider the way they are making those arguments in the first place. With less hyperbole, less use of strong, emotive language such as “toxic” and more in the way of constructive, descriptive comments, we can all get to know the way we feel about things a lot more easily, and we can move forward in debates and discussions.

As it stands, however, the second someone jumps onto their high horse with a disproportionately passionate reaction to something that is, in many cases, very simple, I simply cannot take them seriously. And I doubt that’s the effect they want to have with their arguments.

I certainly don’t. Which is why I’m making an effort to tone down my own hyperbole and try to speak like a normal human being when communicating on the Internet as much as possible. With a text-based medium of communication like the Internet, you have a moment to pause before you respond to or broadcast something to look back on what you’ve written, reflect and decide whether that’s really what you wanted to say. Things said in the heat of the moment are often regretted with hindsight; those regrets can be easily avoided with a little less hastiness and a little more consideration, both for yourself and for others.

This was a Public Service Announcement on behalf of the National Hyperbole Authority, the best thing to happen to language in three thousand years.

1544: Sick Notes

As I think I’ve mentioned a couple of times in the past, I keep a few copies of defunct UK games magazine PC Zone around as a reminder of some early forays into writing about games professionally. These ’90s issues of the dead magazine feature nothing more exciting than a few walkthroughs by me, but it’s the rest of them I find so fascinating to read with modern eyes.

What particularly caught my attention recently was a section called “Sick Notes”. This was one of the many different things the magazine did with its last page before the back cover — over time, this included a regular column by “Mr Cursor”, a look back on the month’s gaming and what one of the editorial staff had been up to, and numerous other things.

Sick Notes was the brainchild of Charlie Brooker — yes, that Charlie Brooker — and was intended as a complement to the magazine’s other letters pages. PC Zone at this point had several different “reader input” pages, including a traditional “letters to the editor” page, a “Watch Dogs” letters page where readers could write and complain about service they’d received from hardware and software manufacturers, and a “Troubleshooter” letters page where they could ask technical queries about PC problems.

Sick Notes, meanwhile, was marketed as “The Place to Write for Abuse” so you knew what you were getting when you wrote in — and you had to write specifically to Sick Notes. It certainly lived up to its name. Here’s one memorable example that won the monthly £50 “Loser of the Month” prize, with Brooker’s response in bold beneath.

I see that in issue 67 of your “magazine” you asked us to send in a game idea. How’s this then: You start off in a primary school where all goes well and you please the teachers. You then progress to secondary education and achieve above average results and so decide to sit A-levels in your local college and finally, after four years in university, end up with an honours degree in English language and English literature.

AND THEN YOU END UP WRITING YOUR PATHETIC [swearword] PIECE OF [swearword] PAGE-FILLING SO-CALLED COLUMN.

Mark Richardson

There was a boy called Mark Richardson at my school. Everyone called him ‘skids’ because once, in the PE changing rooms, somebody noticed that he had huge brown skidmarks in his underpants. Not that this inability to tackle basic personal hygiene was restricted just to poor wiping skills. He smelled bad pretty much all the time. He was a mess. His face was permanently coated with a faintly shiny film of sweat and grime, his hair so caked in grease it recalled television footage of unfortunate seabirds in the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez oil slick. His clothing was dirty. To use the Whizzer and Chips terminology of the day, it ‘ponged’.

But the worst thing about Skids was the way he picked his nose. He was always at it, plugging a finger in as far as he could, corkscrewing it around inside the nasal cavity, unhooking entire strata of half-dried mucus, drawing out measureless strings of oleaginous grey-green slime. Then he’d take them to his mouth, puckering his lips as if sampling some exotic delicacy. Skids devoured snot. He relished it. Guzzled it. Chewed it up and swallowed it whole, then painted his finger clean with his pink, stubby tongue. Made you sick just to watch him do that.

Anyway, sorry, what were you saying?

This was pretty much par for the course back around the time of PC Zone issue 70 (December 1998) but looking back on it now it’s hard to believe that this existed. And don’t worry, I’m not about to go off on a whole big “This Is Not Okay” social justice rant here; quite the opposite, in fact. I find it a bit sad that people who write for a living — usually for websites rather than magazines these days, though print is still hanging on in there — don’t really have the freedom to express this side of themselves any more; the means for some much-needed stress relief, and for the readers to try their luck against one of the most notoriously acerbic wits in the business.

I mean, sure, these days we have the people who have made a name for themselves with strong opinion pieces — people like Ben Kuchera and Jim Sterling spring to mind immediately, and there are others, too — but it’s not the same thing at all. Brooker didn’t just blindly insult people in Sick Notes — though he always did so with carefully-considered barbs rather than mindless abuse on that page — he also wrote witty, creative, unconventional articles that were entertaining to read far ahead of fulfilling some sort of amorphous “obligation”. And he wasn’t alone, either; the writers of Zone, among them, did all sorts of things with even their most mundane articles, with particularly memorable examples including entire reviews written as movie scripts, a “Franglais” preview of Flashback follow-up Fade to Black written from the perspective of its protagonist Conrad Hart, and countless others I’ve doubtless forgotten.

What’s my point? I’m not quite sure, really, but I think it’s that people who wrote about games used to seem like they were having more fun with it. This isn’t to say that there aren’t great, entertaining writers out there whose work is a pleasure to read, but rather there seems to be something of an unspoken rule that things need to be taken very seriously these days. You’ve got to get that SEO; you’ve got to get those clicks; you’ve got to capitalise on the popular things of the time; you’ve got to be seen to be criticising the things other people are criticising.

Cynical? Perhaps, but it’s why things like Goat Simulator feel so obnoxiously forced; what should be a silly little game that people stumble across organically and then tell their friends about has become something heavily promoted and treated with, in a number of cases, considerably more respect than I think even its creators intended. Fair play to them for successfully capturing the imagination of the press and the public, I guess, but it’s just not the same as the magic I feel reading an old PC Zone and comparing it to its rivals PC Format and PC Gamer as well as multiformat magazines, each of which had their own distinctive tone about them.

We can’t go back now, though; the world expects daily updates as things happen these days, rather than a monthly digest of things the editorial team thought were interesting, intriguing or just amusing. And the world certainly doesn’t expect a member of a site’s staff to hurl such an amazing torrent of intelligent abuse at them as Brooker did to Mark Richardson above; these days, treating your readership with such contempt is probably a firing offence.

Which is kind of weird, when you think about it; websites deal with reader numbers that magazines, even in their heyday, could only dream of, while for a magazine like PC Zone, every reader counted and thus you’d think posting something like Brooker’s response would be taking something of a big risk.

Maybe it was too much of a risk. Maybe that’s why PC Zone doesn’t exist any more. But I’ll be honest with you; I miss those days. I’d much rather be working on a monthly magazine than a constantly-updated website, but this is 2014; that’s the way things are, so I must, as the saying goes, “deal with it”.

1543: Secret Diaries

Sue Townsend apparently died today. As with any “celebrity” (or at least well-known person) death, I’m not sure whether I really feel “sad” about this, but it’s certainly the end of an era, and I definitely have some very fond memories of her work.

The Adrian Mole books that she wrote are, I think, the books I’ve re-read the most number of times in my life. When I first acquired copies of the first two books — battered old hand-me-downs with pages falling out; copies that I imagine used to belong to my brother — I had literally no idea what to expect. I didn’t even know whether Adrian Mole was a person or some sort of anthropomorphized Wind in the Willows-style character.

It wasn’t very long before I was hooked. I started reading them at just the right age, and managed to catch the subsequent books at similarly relevant points throughout my life. While I’ve enjoyed the whole series over time, I feel that the first two books in particular — The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4 and The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole — remain the highlights for me. I retain, to this day, something of a fascination with teenage life; a fascination that I can continually indulge thanks to anime, TV shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and all manner of other media. I think it’s the whole “coming of age” thing that appeals to me; seeing people go through genuinely formative experiences and changing as a result.

The events that transpire in the Adrian Mole books are all rather mundane in nature, but help to shape Adrian into the person he later becomes. While he ends up not exactly realising a lot of his potential in later life, he remains, for the most part, a relatable character with whom I often found myself identifying, particularly in the early books. His feeling of slight detachment from the rest of the world, particularly when it came to being “cool”, making friends or talking to girls, was something that I also found myself experiencing, and while I stopped short of considering myself an “intellectual” at the age of 13, there were times that I felt I could have been writing that secret diary myself.

In fact, I did write several secret diaries over the years, beginning shortly after when I read the Adrian Mole books. Sadly, all of these (to my knowledge, anyway) have been lost to the mists of time, usually because I ended up writing something that embarrassed myself so much that I threw the whole thing away so there was absolutely no risk of anyone else ever having the chance of stumbling across it. I kind of regret that now; much as I regularly like browsing back over my entries on this blog — the Random Post button at the top is a vaguely fun time if you have nothing better to do — I also liked looking back over old diaries and reading my thoughts and feelings about things. During my teenage years, entries were often about girls and my various feelings towards them, inevitably unrequited. During my university years, entries were often about girls, too, but also, I feel, sparked the beginning of my coming to understand my own anxiety and depression issues — issues that I’m still coming to terms with today.

If nothing else, writing down thoughts and feelings about things — even the most mundane things — can prove to be an enormously cathartic experience. I know that the fact my romantic (and, uh, erotic) feelings towards several girls in high school were inevitably unrequited was made somewhat easier to deal with by having that “release” of writing down how I felt about these things at times; and when I tried my hand at writing a diary again a couple of times during my university studies, it proved to be similarly helpful.

What I’m doing with this blog is, for the most part, the same thing; the difference here is that it’s public and digital rather than scrawled in biro and hidden under my mattress. Regular readers will know I’m pretty open about a lot of things, though, and the world hasn’t ended as a result; perhaps if someone had inadvertently stumbled across those secret diaries — or, if they did, spoken up about them — it wouldn’t have been all that bad.

Or perhaps it could have been the most mortifying experience in the world. I guess we’ll never know, now.

Oh, and if, by any chance, through some twisting and turning of the worldlines, my 14-year old self ends up reading this? Give up on Nikki, mate; she’s well out of your league.

1542: Terebi Desu

Our new TV arrived today at some ungodly hour in the morning — which felt all the more ungodly for the fact that excellent Vita dungeon crawler Demon Gaze had kept me enraptured until 3am — and I’ve been having a bit of a play with it. (For the curious, it’s a Samsung Series 6 55-inch LED TV; it has a catchy three thousand-digit model number but I have no idea what it is.)

When Andie suggested we grab a new TV, I was a little concerned that it might not be a significant upgrade over what we already had — a 40-inch Samsung, albeit one that is now about four or five years old. After all, despite the fact that my previous TV was an end-of-line model when I bought it — making it much cheaper — it was pretty good. Three HDMI ports, built-in Freeview tuner, full 1080p support — it had pretty much everything I needed, though it would have been nice to have an optical output port. Everything I connected to it worked just fine, though, ranging from the PlayStation 2 through the SCART port (yummy, blurry standard-def picture) to the various games consoles and PC through the HDMI ports.

With the previous TV working just fine, why buy a new one, you might ask? Well, having spent this evening playing some Final Fantasy XIV on it and having watched some anime and TV on it earlier… yes, it was a good investment. The increase in size is extremely noticeable — it’s big enough to have a touch of “peripheral vision” now, giving a much more immersive feel to both video and games — and the LED screen is lovely, bright and clear. I have no idea if I’ve optimized its settings appropriately — I’ve put the PC input into Game mode, because prior to that there was noticeable input lag, but haven’t really fiddled with much else — but it certainly seems to look very nice, although as Andie pointed out, the bigger the screen you get, the more of a dog’s dinner standard-definition footage and TV broadcasts look. Oh well.

It’s a Smart TV, too, which means it has two remotes, one of which has a trackpad rather than, you know, just being normal, plus “apps” for doing shit old, dumb TVs don’t do. There’s stuff like BBC iPlayer and Netflix built into it, for example, and even apps for things like Spotify and the like. (There are also games to download, but somehow I don’t see them being particularly worthwhile, and as such I will be giving them a wide berth.) I’m not entirely convinced how much I will use the “smart” features over time, but it’s nice to have them there, I guess — not to mention the fact it is seemingly now impossible to buy a new TV that isn’t 1) “smart” and 2) 3D.

The 3D thing surprises me somewhat, I must confess. I thought 3D TV and gaming had been a colossal failure, and yet all the televisions we looked at over the weekend were 3D in one form or another. The TV we ended up getting is “active 3D”, which is supposedly better because you have to turn the glasses on before they work properly (and for some other reasons, too) and sure, it’s quite fun — we watched a couple of trailers in 3D earlier and it was quite cool — but it’s not something I can see myself using a lot of, and certainly not for protracted periods of time. It will almost certainly be something to show off to people who come and visit, but little else.

Anyway, I’m very pleased with it. It fits nicely on our TV stand and doesn’t look too big or too small, and it’s a noticeable upgrade over what we had before — plus the almost bezel-free design, with the picture going right the way to the edges of the front of the unit, looks absolutely smashing.

I’m sure I’ll be taking it for granted before long — and I’m not looking forward to moving it when our new house is sorted — but yes; I’m glad we got it. And now I’m off to bed because I’ve been staring at it all evening and I think my eyes could probably do with a rest!

1541: Reclaiming the Inbox

Oh my goodness, email. What a massive pain in the arse you are. And yet you shouldn’t be; you should be a convenient, quick means of asynchronous communication, and instead you’re a cluttered, nigh-useless mess.

At least my personal account is. So I’m trying to do something about it. When unnecessary mailing list entries that I never read show up, I unsubscribe with due haste. When my inbox starts to fill up with useless crap, I highlight it all and archive it — if I haven’t read it immediately, it almost certainly isn’t important to go back to in a few days’ time.

With a little coercion, I’m confident that I can start getting my inbox back under control. The trouble I’m having is largely due to the period of time where my personal email was also my professional email — while I was working on GamePro I didn’t have my own address — and consequently got signed up to about a bajillion PR lists. Subsequently, when I worked for Inside Network, I then got signed up for a bajillion more PR lists for mobile games and apps — and there are a fuckload more mobile games and apps released every week than there are on computers and consoles. (And approximately 2 or 3 at most worth caring about, if that.)

The reason I’m doing this is because I actually want to start using email again. When I think back to the early days of having an email address, receiving new messages was exciting. Spam was rare, and it always felt like an “event” to see Outlook Express pop up its progress bar and indicate that yes, messages were incoming via the magic of dial-up Internet. (Random, no-longer-existent free ISPs for the win. I was a “Hot Toast” man, myself.) This was because it was an event to receive a message — someone had taken the time to actually write to you.

These days, the former function of email is largely covered by social media — to a point, anyway. But it’s not quite the same, particularly with how much both Facebook and Twitter have wandered off from their original incarnations when they were first introduced. Facebook these days — even with my recently pruned feed — is nothing but links with people going “OMG SO AMAZING” or some other such hyperbole, while Twitter is inherently limited thanks to its character counts, and is becoming increasingly intolerable anyway thanks to the increasing regularity with which the social justice crowd continue to peddle their opinions and refuse to listen to anyone else.

Then there’s longer-form writing such as this blog, but that’s a broadcast rather than a personal message. Sure, I could write private password-protected posts and send them to individuals or small groups of people, but if I’m going to do that, I may as well just send them an email in the first place. It feels impersonal.

Which leaves email, as one of the most long-standing means of digital communication out there, as arguably the most practical means of actually getting in touch with other people — so long as you take control of it, that is. Going forward, my “good intention” is to try and use email a lot more than I have done in the past, perhaps to keep in touch with people I don’t speak to enough on a daily basis or even to get to know people I want to know a bit better… a bit better.

This is a bold plan, I know, and I wonder if it will prove to be a fruitless endeavour if everyone else has the same saturated inbox problem as me, but it’s worth a try. Email is a brilliantly simple but amazing technology that brings people closer together, and it’s wasted by most of us on a daily basis as we take it for granted. So I’m going to try and stop doing that. Maybe. We’ll see.

No you can’t have my email address. Unless you ask really nicely.

1540: Darkness

The focus of the new season is very much on what were previously secondary characters.

I’m finally on to the final (well, most recent) season of To Love-Ru, aka To Love-Ru Darkness, and it’s been really interesting to see this show’s evolution over time in several ways, even over the course of just a few years.

The first series of To Love-Ru came out in 2008 and was a fairly conventional episodic format in which each episode was largely self-contained. Motto To Love-Ru, which followed two years later in 2010, instead followed the “mini-episodes” approach of Ika Musume/Squid Girl. And To Love-Ru Darkness, which aired two years after that in 2012, returns to an episodic format, but with a much stronger sense of ongoing plot and frequent use of cliffhangers to close off each episode.

The atmosphere has changed markedly over time, too. The original series of To Love-Ru was rather silly, light-hearted nonsense that, as I’ve previously mentioned, was pretty undemanding fluff that you can watch without having to concentrate too hard — but it did close out the season with a spectacular two-part finale that brought things to a natural break, if not complete closure.

Motto To Love-Ru, meanwhile, was enjoyable but for the most part felt even more “disposable” thanks to its short mini-episodes. Over the course of the series, we got a better understanding of the various characters involved by simply seeing them in a variety of different situations, but there was relatively little in the sense of overarching narrative that advanced as the series progressed aside from the introduction and exploration of a couple of new characters. The season finale, meanwhile, was a big moment for several of the characters involved, but in a completely different way to the original show. Rather than being an overblown epic involving protagonist Rito battling against unfeasible odds in an attempt to prove himself as in the first season, it instead was a fairly low-key affair that, in contrast to the rest of the run, linked its three mini-episodes together and culminated in a long-awaited confession from Rito to lead heroine (and super-cute space alien) Lala — and an unfortunate misunderstanding as he attempted to also confess to secondary love interest Haruna (who is likewise super-cute, but not a space alien).

To Love-Ru Darkness picks up directly from where Motto To Love-Ru left off, in contrast to how Motto To Love-Ru assumed some time had passed between the first series, the first set of OVAs and the new season. And it has a noticeably different focus so far in the few episodes I’ve watched, too; rather than focusing on the relationship between Rito and Lala that was the centrepiece of both To Love-Ru and Motto To Love-Ru, early episodes instead explore the character of Lala’s sister Momo, whose devious machinations sort of have Rito’s interests at heart, but are fundamentally largely incompatible with the norms of Earth society.

Lala, the centrepiece of the previous two seasons, doesn't even appear in a lot of promotional artwork for Darkness. — Lala, the centrepiece of the previous two seasons, doesn’t even appear in a lot of promotional artwork for Darkness.

In short, Momo decides after seeing Rito make his heartfelt confessions at the end of Motto To Love-Ru that she, too, likes Rito, and decides that the best thing for everyone involved in the increasingly complicated love polygon situation they all find themselves in would be if Rito marries Lala, becomes King of the Universe and consequently no longer bound by the rules of Earth society, then marries everyone else that he has ever had feelings for or who has had feelings for him. She, in short, is firmly in favour of creating a harem of concubines for her beloved — a harem in which she, too, will play her role, of course.

Rito, thus far, is somewhat resistant to this idea, since being of the “perpetually confused protagonist” mould, he is still not quite sure what his true feelings are with regard to Lala and Haruna, let alone Momo (who keeps showing up almost naked in his bed at night-time, much to his chagrin), class representative Kotegawa (whom Rito has a habit of falling over into inappropriately), the extraterrestrial assassin Golden Darkness (who clearly doesn’t really want to kill Rito) and, indeed, his own sister Mikan, who has struck up something of a friendship with Golden Darkness. Constantly yanked from one situation beyond his control to another, I can sense that this season is going to see some of Rito’s toughest trials to date — particularly now that some new characters, such as Golden Darkness’ “sister”, have gotten involved.

In keeping with the previous seasons and OVA sets, the amount of fanservice has once again been ratcheted up, with the number of bare nipples and panty flashes in To Love-Ru Darkness having increased noticeably since the original (rather tame in comparison) season and even since the somewhat more suggestive Motto To Love-Ru. The show refuses to devolve into nothing but T&A, however; even amid all the clear and present fanservice, there’s still an ongoing plot that, this time around, seems to blend the silliness of the earlier seasons with something that provides a bit more meat on the bones.

It’s shaping up to be an interesting season, all round, and I’m looking forward to seeing where Rito’s misadventures take him next.

1539: Winding Up

The weekend is coming to a close, and another week of work beckons. After that, there will be another weekend, and the whole cycle will repeat over and over and over again.

This weekend has been quite nice despite the fact we haven’t really done all that much. Andie and I paid not one but two visits to a nice local restaurant/bar/lounge type place called Trago Lounge that we were first introduced to for a friend’s birthday a while back. We went there on Saturday for one of their excellent burgers — the “Hero Burger”, which also features chorizo, some unidentifiable green goo that tastes nice, chipotle mayo and a pickled chilli in a toasted, crispy brioche bun is delicious — and enjoyed it so much we decided we’d drop in for breakfast today.

Trago Lounge has a substantial breakfast menu, largely inspired by the sort of stuff you’d typically get in an American breakfast-specialist place such as the Half-Day Cafe in Marin County, CA that my parents always insist on going to every time we go and visit my brother. (To be fair, they do do amazing breakfasts.) Today, I tried a stack of eggy bread with crispy bacon and syrup — predictably yummy, though the bacon was a little overdone — while Andie had what was called “dirty beans”, which was essentially a bowl full of home-made baked beans (three different types) with a healthy dollop of barbecue pulled pork and some lumps of toasted ciabatta to dip. It’s not what I would have called “breakfast” per se, but Andie enjoyed it. (It was a little too oniony for me, however.)

After that, we wandered into town for an idle look around and I ended up buying a new television. I recently came into a bit of money, you see, and while I’m intending on saving most of it, Andie quite rightly suggested that it was probably worth spending some of it on something nice that I’d enjoy. After a considerable amount of umming and ahhing — there really wasn’t all that much I want to spent a considerable amount of money on right now, aside from, you know, the house we’re buying — Andie suggested replacing my current TV, which is now a good few years old. It still works perfectly well, I might add, but the new one is significantly bigger, has an almost bezel-free edge, is an LED screen (as opposed to my current TV’s LCD), has optical sound output instead of analogue and has a lot more options to tweak for optimising performance when watching TV, watching movies or playing games. Oh, and it’s 3D, too, because it’s apparently impossible not to buy a 3D TV any more, despite 3D TV not really being anywhere near as much of a thing that everyone tried to convince us a year or two back.

Anyway, that’s turning up on Wednesday because John Lewis apparently don’t stock anything above 50 inches in store (it’s 55) so we’re both looking forward to that. And that, really, was my weekend. Oh, I found two Atmas in Final Fantasy XIV earlier on, but I’m sure you don’t want to hear about that. And people got angry on Twitter earlier on (not at me!), but people always get angry on Twitter and I’m frankly beyond giving a shit about any of it any more.

So that’s that, really. Night night.