1197: 32-Bit Power

It's my birthday today. I am 32. Big fucking whoop.

I still have a somewhat childish outlook on a lot of things, I will freely admit — come on, it's endearing — and birthdays are one of those things. I still feel that birthdays are special days, that they should be celebrated and enjoyed — and that preferably, nothing unpleasant should happen to you on them. Ideally, you wouldn't even have to work on your birthday — it would be a guaranteed holiday for each individual person — and you could just spend the day eating cake, reading cards, opening presents and wondering how you'll spend your birthday money.

Which is why I'm here at just after 10pm in the evening feeling a bit glum. Today has… well, not "sucked" exactly, but it has been nothing but a normal day in which I got a significantly larger number of posts on my Facebook Timeline than usual. Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful for people taking a moment to wish me happy birthday after Facebook reminded them to do so, but it's not really the same as, you know, something exciting happening. And absolutely nothing exciting has happened today. At all. It has just been a Monday. Any other Monday.

It doesn't help that Andie is ill and thus we can't really do anything exciting and celebratory, though we are going to Canada at the weekend, so I'll look at that as a slightly-belated birthday celebration. I also had some friends over at the weekend for board and computer games, and had the chance to catch up with some other friends I haven't seen for ages on Sunday, so that was nice, and I'm grateful for that.

I can't shake the feeling that today should have been more "special" than it was, though. It just wasn't. At all. And I know that as you get older, birthdays do get less and less special — largely because you've had so many of them, but also because you start to get to a point where you want to forget about them — but, you know, I still like to feel like there's a day that's "mine"; a day when I can enjoy myself, when I can be immune from the unpleasantness of the world and just enjoy a bit of selfishness for once.

Today wasn't that day.

Oh well. There's always next year.

BALLS

1193: London Calling

I went to London today. I do not like going to London. I do not like London generally, in fact.

Fortunately, my trip to London today meant that I didn't have to go very far, as in I didn't have to catch the tube or the train or the bus or anything like that. We got a coach in (which, yes, did require getting up at 5 in the morning, but which was a relatively painless experience) then were able to walk to where we were going (the passport office, if you were curious) and then walk back, catch the bus home and not have to piss about with Londoners and their attitudes towards other people.

For many, living in London appears to be some sort of ultimate goal, some sort of Ultimate Cool Status. It is, of course, certainly true that a lot of industries make their home in the nation's capital — the UK video games industry barely acknowledges that any other city exists, for example — but I cannot possibly imagine ever living there. It must be hellish. And expensive. Why would you want to pay a fortune to live somewhere that is hellish?

I had a job offer a while back that would have required me to move to London. I've thought back on my career path since then, which has been entirely working from home for American companies, and I wonder if I might have been better off taking that one as it was a more inherently "stable" position. The conclusion I inevitably reach is "no", incidentally, with a large contributing factor to feeling that way being the fact that I don't have to live in London. (The others being that I wouldn't, by now, be living back in Southampton near my friends and with Andie, which are all awesome things in my life that I'm happy about.)

I'll tell you why I don't like London. Well, some of the reasons, anyway.

The weather is never right. When it's grey and miserable, it's really grey and miserable, and the dirty streets and oppressive, cramped way in which all the buildings are crammed together just emphasises how grey and miserable it is. When it's hot, meanwhile, like it was today, it's really hot, and humid, and the thickness of the dirty air from the hordes of cars who inexplicably think it's a good idea to drive around Central London (hint: it's really not) just makes it all the more unpleasant to immerse yourself in. Particularly when, yes, you've been up since five in the morning.

As I said above, thankfully I didn't really run into my other London bugbears today as we were pretty much "in and out" — or as close to "in and out" as is possible when riding a bus from a couple of hours' drive away. For the record, though, said bugbears largely revolve around people who have to be wherever they're going faster than you getting wherever you're going. This most commonly shows itself on the Underground escalators, where the left lane is the "dickhead" lane of people who think that barging past people who are often carrying large, heavy suitcases and/or bags will get them where they're going a bit faster. (Hint: it probably doesn't, given that when you get to the bottom you all have to wait for the same train.) It also shows itself on the street, where if you dare walk anywhere except smooshed up against a wall, some jerkoff in a suit will come charging past you on Important City-Boy Business and make you — just for one, single, blissful, homicidal instant — consider pushing him into the path of the open-top tour bus that is coming around the corner.

As I say, though, thankfully I didn't encounter any of these issues today, and instead we saw some ducks, geese and other unidentified (well, someone has identified them, obviously) birds in St. James' Park. Which was quite nice.

I still hate London, though. Even with its "nice bits".

1191: Social Burnout

I've been thinking this for quite a while, as you've probably noticed from past posts I've made on the subject, but I'm beginning to feel completely burned-out on social media. Everything has to be social these days. Everything has to have little like buttons and little comment buttons and allow every denizen of the Internet to spew their ill-informed thoughts and opinions over it, or to share it pointlessly to Facebook.

Earlier today, I was distressed to discover that an official Pizza Hut app is coming to Xbox 360, presumably aimed at those people who find phoning, using a mobile phone app or using the Internet to order a pizza too easy and would instead prefer to do so by navigating the monstrosity that is the Metro interface. One line in the Polygon article about it — here — jumped out at me and kind of drove it home how "way too far" we've taken social media these days. Here it is:

"After submitting an order, users can share their choice with friends via Facebook."

Why. Why. Why why whywhywhy would you want to do this?

Pizza Hut aren't the only offenders in this regard, of course — Amazon offer a convenient facility to tweet or share on Facebook anything that you've just bought, as do a lot of other websites. You can even set up the PlayStation 3 and Vita to automatically share every purchase you make on PSN to Facebook. And every time I see this facility, I wonder why on Earth anyone would want to use it. But apparently people do.

This glut of auto-sharing is killing the original point of social media, which was to allow people to engage in conversations with one another by sharing things that were important to them. Now, it's more like a convention of ADHD sufferers running around going "I JUST BOUGHT A PIZZA! LOOK AT THIS VIDEO OF A DUCK RUNNING! HERE'S A PICTURE OF A CAT! I'D SAY SOMETHING PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE BUT 'SOMEBODY' WOULDN'T LIKE IT!" rather than what I remember my early experiences with Facebook being like.

I vividly recall resisting signing up to Facebook in its early days, because everyone seemed to be doing it and I just couldn't be arsed with it. When I eventually started using it, however, I was impressed to discover a site that was seemingly built for real-life friends. Any time I added someone to my friends list, I had to indicate how I knew them, and the other person had to verify that story. My profile was only visible in full to those whom I had marked as a friend, and there weren't really any privacy settings to worry about. Stuff that was shared was the sort of stuff you'd share if you were actually in the same room with friends — what you'd been up to, some photos from your holiday, perhaps a longer piece of writing in the form of a "Note". No games, no spam, no "I Fucking Love Science" posts. Just actual interactions. The Like button was there, but it didn't have the all-encompassing power it has now, and people hadn't really started using it as a substitute for actually saying things.

Now, though, with the proliferation of "LIKE IF YOU HATE CANCER, SHARE IF YOU LOVE KITTENS" posts, the signal-to-noise ratio is all out of whack, and people are used to posting tons of crap while simultaneously saying nothing of value. This has the side-effect of meaning that when you actually want a response from someone, it's quite difficult to get one. The other day I attempted to find someone to take care of our pet rats while we're on holiday in Canada; the only responses I got were jokey, non-serious ones, and within a couple of hours it had dropped off the face of everyone's News Feed, never to be seen again… unless I were to slip Facebook $7 to "promote" it, of course.

Or take today, when I saw someone post an actual non-rhetorical question that needed an answer, and the first response was a "Like".

Not helpful. At all. You "Like" my question? Great. Do you "Like" it enough to actually fucking answer it, perhaps? No? Then piss off. I'm not so desperate for validation that I count the number of "Likes" a particular post gets and see it as some form of brag-worthy e-peen.

That said, if you want to "Like" my new "K-On Girls Wear the Union Jack" fanart cover photo, feel free.

Sigh. I'm such a hypocrite.

I've been rediscovering forums recently — I was a member of a My Little Pony forum for a while before it shut down due to admin drama, and I'm currently taking some tentative steps into the RPG Maker community. While forums have their own issues — largely people being a little lawyerish about the community rules and regulations — I'm beginning to think they're not such an outdated means of discussion as many seem to think…

1186: Don't Hate

There's a curious phenomenon in comments sections around the land. And that phenomenon is that it is seemingly the law that someone, somewhere, must hate everything. Actually, that's badly phrased; I don't mean that one person hates everything — though I'm sure there are people who do — but instead I mean that whatever the thing that has been posted, there will always be at least one person who dislikes it for some reason and is inevitably the sort of person who is very vocal about their dislike of it.

This seems to happen particularly frequently in sectors that already have passionate userbases, or in which the userbases are seen as being a "subculture" and/or outside the "norm" somehow. I'm thinking specifically of the video games and anime sectors here — and before you start on me, for all the massive steps forward these media have made in terms of mainstream acceptance over the last 20-30 years they are still indelibly tarred with the "geek" brush to one degree or another.

Today, I was exploring the RPG Maker community who, by all accounts, appear to be a fairly friendly and helpful bunch for the most part, as I've previously mentioned. I was curiously browsing through some of the other users' projects in progress and came across a few interesting-sounding games. One of the users noted that they had submitted their game to Steam Greenlight, the process whereby a game can end up being sold on Valve's popular PC gaming digital download storefront if it gets enough positive votes from the community.

The game, by all accounts, sounded interesting and unconventional, and something I'd be intrigued to play. It was an "artistic" game, for want of a better word, designed as a means for the author to show what it was like living with depression. The author said upfront on the site that it was a mostly-linear, narrative-centric experience with a lot of text, and made no apologies for this fact. (For people like me, the terms "narrative-centric" and "lot of text" are selling points, not things to be ashamed of!)

Sadly, the Greenlight comments section was less than supportive for various reasons, featuring disparaging remarks for everything from it being "another depression game" (oh, sorry, there have been so many of those) to dismissing it simply because it's an RPG Maker game. I've made my feelings on the latter point quite clear in the past, but they bear repeating: if a tool is available to help someone realise their artistic vision, there's no reason why they shouldn't use it, regardless of how many other people are also using it. And besides, some of my favourite games in recent memory have been RPG Maker titles — Corpse Party, To The Moon, Cherry Tree High Comedy Club… all of them were made in earlier versions of RPG Maker that were considerably less sophisticated than the excellent toolset that is VX Ace.

But I digress. The point is that the comments section was filled with hate for the sake of hate rather than actually constructive feedback. The fact that the game in question (Actual Sunlight, I believe it was called) was "another depression game" and an RPG Maker project had nothing to do with its quality, or its "value" to the Steam community as a whole, and yet these things were used as reasons to reject it, without even bothering to check it out.

In the anime sector, it seems that it's fashionable to hate on whatever the biggest name show is at the time. Most recently, this has been seen with Sword Art Online, which I found to be a rollicking good time with an astonishingly spectacular soundtrack, some memorable characters and an interesting, intriguing and pleasingly mature (for the most part, anyway) storyline. It was a good show, in short; while it perhaps wasn't the most intelligent anime you'll ever see, it was certainly far more than a dumb, formulaic show.

Perhaps not something everyone would want to watch, no, but certainly far better than the overly-negative comments that would appear on J-List's Facebook page any time site owner Peter Payne posted a piece of artwork relating to SAO. (Granted, J-List's Facebook page is a place where any time a picture of a vaguely attractive anime girl is posted, one specific user will always be along within three comments of the start of the thread to helpfully inform everyone that "[he] would fuck her", so it's perhaps not the best place to go for objective criticism, but still; you'd expect a community of Japanophiles such as the followers of J-List's page to be a bit more enthusiastic about the things they supposedly like!)

I honestly don't get why this happens, and it seems to happen a lot. Why waste your time on hate when there is so much stuff out there to get you excited? Wouldn't you rather feel happy and intrigued by something than angry or upset?

1185: Top Ten Panty Shots in Video Games

I'm not normally a big fan of Ben Kuchera's work (for reasons I won't go into right now because they're not relevant to what I want to talk about) but he's bang on the money (no pun intended) with this piece.

I shan't reiterate Kuchera's points here — read the feckin' article! — but I will say that on this note, I do agree with him.

The Internet's (and tech in general's) reliance on advertising has to end. It's not sustainable. It simply isn't. And in the meantime, all it's doing is devaluing content, pissing people off and causing us to continually circle the plughole, drawing ever closer to being sucked into oblivion forever, or at the very least into that weird, disgusting black smelly goo we found in the end of the pipe the last time our sink got blocked.

Whenever a site like, say, Kotaku (who are usually the ones who get picked on for this sort of thing, but they're far from the only offenders) posts some bullshit story that gets everyone riled up about how irrelevant/pointless/offensive it is, the war cry that goes up is that they're doing it "for the hits". More accurately, as Kuchera says, they're doing it for the pageviews, because like it or not, the bullshit stories that make everyone angry are the ones that lots of people take a look at "just to see what the fuss is about". The Daily Mail makes a living from posting this sort of garbage on a daily basis; Kotaku at least punctuates its rubbish with some interesting and thought-provoking pieces, while the Mail is just uninterrupted crap. As Kuchera notes, though, the bullshit more often than not pays for the interesting and thought-provoking pieces.

It's not just professionally-written content that suffers from this problem, though. Look at Facebook and the idiotic, illiterate ads that festoon its sidebar on every page. Look at Facebook (again) and its obnoxious, obtrusive "Sponsored Posts" thrusting themselves in your face uninvited. Look at Twitter and its "Promoted Tweets" that you don't want to see. Look at whatever bullshit ad WordPress has decided to serve up underneath my writing on this site (although only on the mobile site, seemingly) Look at the mobile app I reviewed today, which rammed two full-screen ads down my throat before I could even open the main menu, and two more when I started picking a photo from my device's photo library to manipulate. (I was not kind to said app in the review.) Look at the ads you get for casinos and shady-sounding "download services" any time you browse for porn or torrents or anything else you wouldn't admit to looking for in polite company, but which we all know everyone looks for. (Yes, even you, you pervert.)

Internet advertising isn't positive or helpful. It is, for the most part, shady, misleading, obnoxious and obtrusive. Which is, of course, why it's so understandable that so many people — particularly the tech-savvy among us — run ad-blockers and thus deprive many sites of what little revenue they are scraping in from these revolting blights on the otherwise awesome nature of the Internet's global community.

I don't run ad-blockers. Honestly, this isn't for any particularly noble reason — I simply haven't set one up. But knowing what I know of the online publishing industry from the inside, I don't intend to run one, either. Those "One Weird Tip to Peel Your Skin Off and Whiten Your Teeth in the Casino that One Weird Old Florida Mum Found While Downloading Now!!" ads are many sites' main means of income. This isn't the magazine industry — there's no "cover price"; no newsagent looking over your shoulder and asking rather bluntly "you gonna buy that, mate?" (The magazine industry is, of course, in decline, meaning its model isn't necessarily particularly desirable either — but what do you think damaged it beyond repair in the first place?)

It's clear that this situation has to change. But it's not going to be an easy process. Readers used to consuming content for free and blocking ads are going to have to suck it up and start paying for their content. Content creators need to be confident enough in their work to make it worth paying for. And those responsible for the sort of bullshit ads you see on the Internet every single day… well, frankly they need to find a new career, because they've done more than enough damage to the media biz already.

If things don't change, there are going to be big problems down the line. Whether these problems take the form of the entire "new media" industry turning into the most stupid parts of your Facebook News Feed over and over again or the business collapsing entirely remains to be seen — but I'd rather not see either of those things happen if at all possible.

1184: For the Love of God, Please Learn About Snopes.com

Hello, you, random acquaintance and/or friend of my parents on Facebook. Yes, you. The one who has been clicking "Like" and "Share" on everything from posts that imply you want cancer to kill everyone if you don't click "Like" to posts that wilfully spread misinformation, such as accusations that Red Bull causes brain tumours, that baby carrots are saturated with chlorine, or that aspartame causes cancer, brain tumours and multiple sclerosis.

You know who you are.

I'd like to introduce you to a website. I'd like you and this website to become best friends. I would like you to go to this website any time you find yourself questioning the validity of something that someone else asks you to share. I would like you to check this website before you share the thing that someone asks you to share. And if this website informs you that the thing that someone asks you to share is not, in fact, true, please politely tell the person who asked you to share the thing about this website, and direct them to the relevant entry debunking the thing they asked you to share. (Conversely, if this website informs you that the thing that someone asks you to share is, in fact, true, feel free to share as you see fit, but please stop using quite so many exclamation marks.)

This website is called Snopes.com.

It may not look like much, but it has been around in one form or another since 1995, and has been debunking chain letters and other urban myths ever since. It is a valuable resource that has been proven on numerous occasions to be both accurate and reliable. Please use it.

The reason I bring this up is that the unpleasantness that accompanied the Boston Marathon yesterday has brought with it a number of stories that are complete fabrications, and which have nonetheless found themselves spreading at an alarming rate across all varieties of social media. There is a convenient page summarising all of the claims made about the Boston Marathon and the events which supposedly occurred there right here. Please read it. Please familiarise yourself with it. Please take note of which stories are completely false and/or based on inconclusive, unproven information. Please do not share stories which have been proven to be false, or which are based on inconclusive, unproven information.

You may feel that there is "no harm" in "raising awareness" of issues by sharing things like this, even if they are not true. Unfortunately, that is not the case. By polluting social media with falsehoods, it becomes difficult for people who are personally invested in an unfolding story such as the Boston Marathon bombings to determine what the facts really are. By polluting social media with falsehoods, you run the risk of causing considerable distress to these people who are likely already very emotional. By polluting social media with falsehoods you continue to perpetuate a cycle where people willingly share misinformation in lieu of actually doing something useful, because clicking "like" and "share" feels like you've done your bit. And, frankly, by polluting social media with falsehoods, you make yourself look uninformed at best; gullible and stupid at worst.

So use a bit of common sense, will you? The next time something sounds unbelievable, it probably is; before you jump on that "Share" button, pay a quick visit to Snopes.com and look up the key points. And if Snopes.com tells you that the claims are complete rubbish, for heaven's sake don't just share them anyway. Educate the person you saw them from. Teach them about Snopes.com. And hopefully together we can make the world a less ignorant place.

1183: Suit Up

I was exceedingly bored today, so rather than sitting around in my pants as I usually do I decided to put on my suit for no reason other than for the hell of it.

Well, there were a few reasons, to be honest. I'm not a particularly vain type, as anyone who has met me and seen the state of my hair (both -cut and facial) will attest, but I've never quite been comfortable with my "look", for want of a better word. I don't really have a signature "look" unless you count "jeans and (usually) geeky T-shirt" as a "look", and I'm not sure I do, because that involves pretty much the minimum amount of effort possible that enables you to go outside and not be arrested.

I also wanted to see if there was any truth to the pseudo-psychological theory that if you dress "professionally" you'll be in a more "worky" frame of mind.

I've also been watching a lot of Friends recently and noted that most of the male characters in that spend a lot of time wearing suits. (This was, of course, followed up by the character of Barney in How I Met Your Mother, who makes wearing a suit into an explicit character trait rather than something that "just is".)

So what were my conclusions?

Umm… to be honest, I'm not sure I really have anything particularly… conclusive. That said, wearing a suit is more comfortable than I remember, though it can get a bit hot and stuffy if you keep the jacket on.

Did I feel more "confident" and "professional", though?

I can't really say with any certainty. This is perhaps largely to do with the fact that I put it on once I had done all my paid work for the day and was taking a wander into town to sit in various coffee shops and post things on Games Are Evil then work on my game a bit. To my credit, I did get quite a lot done, but I think this may be more to do with the amount of coffee I consumed and my surroundings than what I was covering myself up with. Or perhaps it was part of the whole equation.

Oh well. I can't say it was a particularly unpleasant experience, anyway. And since I'm working from home and not in an office, it's about the only airing this suit gets apart from weddings (yes, people I know who got married in the last year, I wore the same suit to your wedding that I "just wear" or put on for job interviews) or job interviews (yes, people who interview me, I wear the same suit to your interview that I wear to my friends' weddings) so I might as well give it a day out every so often.

Am I going to "suit up" as my "new look" though? Probably not. I have far too many geeky T-shirts that I actually like showing off. (No-one has recognised my Deadly Premonition one yet, frustratingly.)

1182: Fixed That For You

I've had a week of not having a lot of luck with technology. Firstly, I was reminded that my electric piano was suffering a sticky key issue on the B above middle C (which is quite a commonly-used note) and proving rather difficult to play effectively. This was annoying, because as I noted yesterday, I'd just come into possession of the official piano arrangements for the Nier and Final Fantasy X-2 soundtracks along with some fan-arranged printouts of a variety of anime and game pieces.

Secondly, my PS2 Slim mutilated my Ar Tonelico 2 disc right in the middle of one of the endings I hadn't seen, causing it to freeze up completely and not be able to go any further. (I have since replaced the PS2 Slim with a PS2 Fat — which hasn't arrived yet — and acquired a new copy of Ar Tonelico 2, but that's some money I didn't really need to spend.)

Fortunately, one of these problems has been rectified thanks to Andie's willingness to get her hands dirty and tinker around inside things. (Get your mind out of the gutter.) Loosely following some instructions online, we took the casing off my Yamaha P80 and had a look inside. It wasn't immediately obvious what was causing the key in question to stick, but as it happened, the process of popping it out (which we didn't even manage to do completely, just sort of half-out) and popping it back in again completely fixed the problem. This was, as I'm sure you can imagine, extremely pleasing as it means 1) I don't have to attempt to fit my piano into the back of a Peugeot 207; 2) I don't have to drive it 25 miles to the nearest Yamaha engineer; and 3) I don't have to pay aforementioned Yamaha engineer £100+ to get it fixed. Don't get me wrong, I would have happily paid Captain Piano-Fix his fee in order to get things sorted, but given that the fix was apparently that simple — I guess the key must have got knocked out of its normal place somehow, perhaps while we were moving house — I'm glad that I don't have to do any of the above three things.

This isn't the first time I've seen something get "fixed" by peculiar means. Back in university, I came into possession of a Sega Saturn, which I still own to this day (though I no longer have any games for it). The controller that came with the Saturn didn't work very well, so, having nothing better to do that evening — my housemate was out and no-one fancied going down to the Union to get obliterated on Juicy Lucies — I took it apart and decided to see what I could do, despite not having any clue whatsoever about how it worked. Eventually, I ended up cleaning the contacts on the circuit board using a piece of kitchen towel dipped in vodka — I honestly have no idea why this particular combination of things seemed like the right thing to do at the time; I was possibly a bit drunk — and putting it back together again. Astonishingly, it worked after this. To date, I have no idea if my ridiculous efforts to "fix" the thing actually had any effect or whether it was just the simple process of taking it apart and putting it together again.

I guess the moral of this story is that if something is broken (and out of warranty) then there are worse things you can do than pull out all the screws, pull everything out and then put it back together again. Obviously don't try and do this on a human body, however, because 1) human bodies don't have any screws and 2) they're a lot harder to put back together once you've disassembled them, which is why degrees in Medicine take so long to complete.

1181: 1:20am Blogging

It is 1:20am and I haven't written anything here, nor do I have any particular idea as to what to write about. So I'm just going to write any old crap that comes into my head right now. I hope you'll forgive me for that. This isn't going to be a "freewriting" exercise as my brain is not awake enough for the mental agility required for that (though doing freewriting when absolutely exhausted is probably an interesting exercise in itself) — instead, it's just going to be… stuff. All right? Good.

As I was logging in to write this post, I happened to see what my "top searches" are. I find these interesting to look at every so often as they provide a curious insight into how people are finding me here. And it's not always in the manner you might expect. (Those bloody stickman GIFs I made a while back attracted a lot of people, but that seems to have died down somewhat now.)

My top searches at present are "My Girlfriend is the President Irina Route", "Candy Crush Features on PC that Aren't on Mobile", "You Have Earned a Trophy" and "Cis Male Guilt". I think that about sums things up nicely, doesn't it? If any of those things have brought you here, allow me to address them in order: Irina's route in My Girlfriend is the President was my third favourite route after Ell-chan and Yukino but ahead of Ran-neechan; Candy Crush Saga is a mug's game whatever platform you play it on, so go and buy a copy of Bejeweled instead; well done, you have earned a trophy; and cis male guilt is one of the most irritating blights on the Interwebs of 2013. Happy? Good.

I've had a fairly dull day today, which is why I don't have a lot to talk about, really. I've done a fair amount of work on my game, though nothing significantly more interesting than the stuff I talked about yesterday. In terms of how far through the "plot" I am, though, I've officially finished the first "day" in the story and got the structure in place for the next five in-game days to branch off in several different directions and lead the player towards one of the endings. So progress is being made — noticeable progress — which is exciting.

In other news? I had a little play on the piano earlier, but given that the B key above middle C is sticking and making it very difficult to play at times, doing so is an infuriating experience. It is doubly infuriating because I have just come into possession of the piano scores for the Nier and Final Fantasy X-2 soundtracks along with a bunch of fan-arranged sheet music for a selection of tracks covering everything from Ar Tonelico 2 to School Days HQ. I would very much like to play all these and record them to share with you, but without a working B key I can't do that to the standard I'd like to. So next week I have to take my keyboard to a scary man in Ringwood who will hopefully fix it without too much difficulty.

That's about it, really. I think I'm going to go to bed now. Andie's having a night out with her friends and isn't back yet. I have no idea when she will be back, but I will almost definitely be awake when it happens. Or perhaps not. I have no idea. I'm quite tired. To such a degree that I'm babbling nonsense out through my fingers, so I think it's probably best for everyone involved if I just cut my losses, click that Publish button and go to bed now. Good night!

1176: Absolute Destiny Apocalypse

At the insistence of my good friend Lynette (well, all right, she mentioned it a couple of times and I was intrigued) I have been watching an anime series called Revolutionary Girl Utena, also known in various places as Shoujo Kakumei Utena and La fillette révolutionnaire Utena.

Utena, as I shall refer to it from hereon, is clearly from a very different period to the anime I have watched to date. It has a very distinctive "'90s anime" appearance to it, particularly with regard to character proportions and design — everyone has chins that could cut glass, and all the girls have inhumanly long legs, a fact usually accentuated by their clothing — but it still makes use of a lot of common non-realistic "stylized" features that we see in modern anime, particularly with regard to facial expressions and the way people move.

Thematically, it's also of a genre I haven't really explored before — technically, it could be described as a "magical girl" anime since Utena regularly gains special powers accompanied by special effects and recognisable catchphrases, but it's a lot more than just Pretty Girl Fights Crime. No; so far I'm only relatively few episodes into the whole thing but it's very clear that there are a lot of things going on.

A friend of mine described Utena as being "like a fever dream" and that's absolutely true. There's a curious sense of surrealism about most of the episodes, with fairly mundane activities juxtaposed with obviously fantastic happenings that only certain characters are aware of. The whole thing is also absolutely riddled with imagery and visual metaphor, some of which are more obvious than others and most of which only contribute to the strange, surreal feelings of things not quite being what they seem.

But you probably want to know what it's all about, right? Well… as I say, I've only seen a few episodes so far so I can't comment with full authority on everything that has happened, but here goes.

Utena is a statuesque high school girl who habitually dresses as a boy. The reason for this is that when she was younger, she was helped by a kind "prince", who gives her a ring with a rose signet and tells the young Utena that it will "lead her to him". It transpires that there are other people out there who wear the rose signet on their rings, and they're at Utena's school. Specifically, they're the student council, who appear to have some sort of special relationship with an unknown entity, person or organisation known as "End of the World" and are keen to "smash the world's shell to bring about revolution" as dictated by their creed. ("If it cannot break out of its shell, a chick will die without being born. We are the chick. The world is our egg.")

Key to the plans of the Student Council is the "Rose Bride" Anthy Himemiya, who also happens to be a student at Utena's school — and who appears to share some characteristics with the "prince" from Utena's past. Anthy, for the most part, appears to be a normal girl, but whoever is "engaged" to her "possesses" her and can make her do anything they want. Through a series of unfortunate happenings, Utena becomes engaged to Anthy and then proceeds to protect her from the other members of the Student Council, who all have their own reasons for wanting to possess the "power of Dios" that Anthy contains.

The interesting thing about the series so far is that no-one is really outright "evil" — there are plenty of obnoxious characters who are unpleasant or dislikable, but they all appear to have their reasons for doing the things they do. In fact, there are several characters who, despite being on the Student Council and thus at various points taking the role of "antagonist", are actually rather sympathetic and/or likable. It's really cool, and I'm looking forward to finding out the truth behind some of them.

Anyway, given that I'm only partway through the series' first story arc, that's really all I can say for now, but I will say that I'm enjoying it, even if it's currently very confusing and bewildering. I get the impression that's entirely deliberate, though — I wonder how many answers I'll have by the end of it all?