1123: Assholes with Nothing Better to Do

I don't know if any of you reading this have ever been properly trolled by someone who really knows what they're doing, but I have. Twice.

The first was during my GamePro days, and I believe I've mentioned it on this blog before. Basically there was this dude who frequented the GamePro Facebook page and was a bit of a nutcase, to put it mildly. He'd often come along and comment on updates, talking about how debit cards were somehow evil and various other ravings. He seemed mostly harmless, however, so he was tolerated, left alone and largely ignored by other members of the community.

That is, until I posted a news story about Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab's interactive JRPG-style exploration of queer issues, A Closed World. Suddenly, nutjob went on the offensive, posting raving comment after raving comment and directly attacking me, accusing me of being a paedophile and all manner of other slurs. Apparently he was a big fat homophobe as well as a crazy person, it seems, so he got summarily blocked from the GamePro Facebook page, reported to Facebook and also blocked from the main GamePro site despite his best efforts to continue harassing me. This rapid response (largely from me, I might add, without engaging with him) meant that he went away pretty quickly, thankfully, but it was still a somewhat unpleasant experience to go through, even though I knew that none of the things he was saying were true.

Something very similar happened today. Yesterday, I received a bizarre tweet from a complete stranger that wasn't a reply to anything which I had said, but which simply called me a "sick, sick man." I took a brief look at this person's profile and they appeared to be… not the sort of person you'd really want to associate yourselves with, let's say, so I immediately blocked them and thought nothing more of it.

Today I received an email from Rob, the owner of Games Are Evil, informing me that he'd received a voicemail from someone — someone who neither he or I knew, I might add. Apparently they'd made some rather unpleasant allegations about me and had supposedly contacted the authorities. Much like the previous time I was attacked without provocation, my heart almost stopped, even though I knew there was absolutely no truth to these allegations whatsoever. It took me quite some time to calm myself down.

Calm myself down I did, though, and I did a little digging, as I was suspicious about a few things. So firstly I went back and looked at the Twitter account that had sent me the strange message last night. The location on it matched the location the caller was supposedly from, and the first name on the account also matched the Twitter account. Things were starting to fall into place.

I checked the WHOIS records for Games Are Evil and discovered that, as I suspected, Rob's phone number and contact details were recorded alongside the site's other information, which explained how this person was able to contact him by phone when the only information on the site itself is a selection of email addresses. The only question left was why someone would do all this.

And the best answer I can come up with is "because they had nothing better to do." My attacker is, according to his Twitter profile, a member of an anti-blogger group with a spectacularly offensive name whom I'd never heard of prior to today, and it seems they have something of a habit of attacking people in this manner for reasons best known unto themselves. It seems that today, I was just unlucky enough to be the one in the firing line. I'm now not all that worried about this ridiculous turn of events, because frankly I don't really see the "authorities" — if they were contacted at all, which I seriously doubt — trusting the word of someone who voluntarily chooses to associate themselves with a group called… well, this. (Wikipedia link, offensive name. You have been warned.)

Still, it sucks that there are people out there malicious enough to pull shit like this against complete strangers. May they all fall off a cliff and land arse-first on a sharp spike. Cunts.

So yeah. Happy Valentine's Day and all that.

1122: Coke Zero May or May Not Taste Like Ass (Inspired by Mike Minotti)

Today's topic comes to you courtesy of GamesBeat, GameStuff and the Exploding Barrel Podcast's Mike Minotti, one of the finest gentlemen I've ever had the pleasure of meeting and one of the biggest fans of Tales of Game's Presents Chef Boyardee's Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, Chapter One of the Hoopz Barkley SaGa I know.

Today I am going to talk about Coke Zero. I have not drunk Coke Zero for at least a year now, because the last time I drank it it tasted like ass. Not literally like ass, obviously — not that I actually really know what ass tastes like — but like shit. Not actual shit, but… oh, you get the idea. It didn't taste good.

Or at least, it didn't taste good after you drank it. Specifically, it had this weird sort of aftertaste thing going on that made your mouth feel all fuzzy and weird afterwards. While you were actually drinking it — particularly if it was nice and cold and in a can — it tasted surprisingly like Coke. And considerably more like Coke than Diet Coke, which doesn't taste like Coke at all. Diet Coke also tastes like ass. But a different kind of ass. The kind of ass that hits you up front with its flavour rather than lingering somewhere around the roof of your mouth making you wonder at what point during the day a leprosy-ridden hobo with an upset stomach farted directly into your oral cavity and you immediately forgot about it. You know, the sort of ass that the Coke Zero of two years ago tastes like.

As I say, though, I haven't had a Coke Zero for a very long time so any accusations of it tasting like ass may, in fact, be completely unjustified at this point in time, and thus I apologise to any dedicated Coke Zero drinkers (such as Mr Mike Minotti) who may take offense to my remarks. Mr Mike Minotti does raise a good point with regard to Coke Zero, though — given that it has no sugar and is supposedly zero calories because it's made of antimatter or something, why didn't it just replace Diet Coke? Were the Coke overlords somehow afraid that the people who inexplicably liked the taste and tooth enamel-stripping properties of Diet Coke would rise up against them and usher in some sort of new world order of black-brown fizzy liquid?

Actually, they probably were, huh. That's probably why Coke Zero is a thing. It's a thing for people who like Coke more than people who like Diet Coke like Coke, and for people who like Coke more than Diet Coke, but also people who don't like the amount of calories and sugariffic goodness that Coke has in it. Coke for people in denial, if you will. Compromise Coke. The Khitomer Accords of Coke, allowing people who like Coke and people who point disapprovingly at people who like Coke to live in harmony with one another. Peace and tranquility.

Actually, that doesn't sound too bad, really. Now I'm thirsty…

1121: Dreamscape

I had a "game dream" last night. As any longtime gamer will tell you, these happen with increasing frequency the more you like or have spent time playing a particular game, are often extremely vivid and are usually quite memorable, too.

In my case — and disappointingly for this blog post, which is about to get a whole lot of padding — I can't remember the specific details about said dream. What I can remember, however, is the peculiar combination of games that formed the basis of said dream. First up were Ar Tonelico, which is my new RPG jam having finished Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2; and Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2 itself — hey, I really, really liked it, okay? These two aren't especially weird to put together, since Ar Tonelico's developer Gust also contributed to Hyperdimension Neptunia and was even personified in the game as the character called, err, Gust.

Combining with Ar Tonelico and Hyperdimension Neptunia was the visual novel Kira Kira, which I was reading shortly before I went to sleep last night, so it's perhaps unsurprising it put in an appearance. Kira Kira doesn't really fit with the other two, though — it may also be Japanese, but it's 1) not an RPG 2) not in a fantasy setting and 3) not quite as "crazy" as the other two.

This isn't as bizarre an inclusion as the presence of CD Projekt Red's dark fantasy opus The Witcher, however, which also put in an appearance courtesy of its white-haired protagonist Geralt, who looked very much out of place alongside the colourful characters from the other games.

As I say, I can't remember what actually happened in the dream, so this story is mostly a waste of time, but I thought it was an interesting combination of things that my subconscious chose to put together — particularly since I haven't played The Witcher for quite some time.

Game dreams don't always blend together experiences like this. Sometimes they're a focused experience based on a single game. Puzzle games used to be particularly bad for this — I remember shortly after getting my very own Lynx (Atari's ill-fated 16-bit handheld which was absolutely enormous) and playing a whole bunch of Klax that I had a number of Klax-related dreams, which mostly centred their attention on my mental image of the female voice that whispered such sweet nothings as "Klax Wave!" and "Yeah!" and "Oooh!" while you were playing. (I think it was the latter that made me go weak at the knees. It was quite a sexy "Oooh!". I have tried to find it on YouTube but instead found nothing but Flight Simulator videos. Apparently "KLAX" is the abbreviation for Los Angeles International Airport. What was I talking about again?)

Um, anyway… Yeah.

Dreams are a strange thing. I am fairly convinced that you can influence your own dreams strongly by what you're doing immediately before you go to sleep (wash your mind out, pervert) but it seems that the most vivid dreams tend to show themselves when you're not specifically trying to think really hard about something, and instead have a mind full of things that have stimulated it. In my case last night, the rather wordy prose of Kira Kira obviously kept my mind active as I drifted off to sleep, and then other influences that I felt strongly about drifted in there, too.

That still doesn't really explain the presence of The Witcher, but eh, I'm tired, so I'm off to read a bit of Kira Kira and then go to sleep for hopefully some more subconscious happy fun times. See you on the other side.

1119: My Deep-Seated and Irrational Annoyance at Clichéd Rhythmic Patterns

I have, as the title of this post suggests, a deep-seated and irrational annoyance at clichéd rhythmic patterns.

By clichéd rhythmic patterns, I mean two specific rhythmic patterns. These are as follows:

…also known as "knock knock-a knock knock… knock knock" or "shave and a haircut, two bits" (don't look that up on Wikipedia like I did, you'll fall into one of those Internet research rabbit-holes and end up reading about Denglisch when you're supposed to be doing something else) and its best friend:

…also known as "bang, bang, bangbangbang, bangbangbangbang, bangbang" or "that annoying football rhythm".

(Incidentally, you can tell how much these rhythms annoy me from the fact that I took the time to use Logic to actually write them out for inclusion in this blog post. And if they're wrong… well, I don't care, because I hate the fucking things.)

I have absolutely no idea why these two rhythmic phrases irritate me quite so much, but it is sufficient to put my teeth on edge any time someone uses them in any context, whether they're drumming their fingers idly, knocking on my door or hitting a drum. Actually, that's not quite true; in the case of the second one, I became particularly irritable towards it when I was a music teacher and the various little scrotes I was teaching thought it was both hilarious and incredibly clever to use it every time I asked them to make up a rhythm of their own. (It also, by tenuous extension, brought back painfully embarrassing memories of a year 7 music class back when I was a pupil, where my friends and I thought it would be awesome to recreate the Pink Panther theme using a set of Indian bells we had and then building the rest of our piece off that. Unfortunately, we didn't get any further than the initial "ding ding-di-ding ding-di-ding" bit in our rehearsal, leading to a mortifyingly awful performance to the rest of the class that was almost completely improvised.)

But yes. Apart from that, I'm not entirely sure why these two rhythms irritate me quite so much, but they really do. I have a suspicion it may be something to do with my own attitude towards creativity and always wanting to see and hear new things. I feel a little uncomfortable when certain things repeat themselves — I feel odd practicing the same piano piece for several days in a row, for example, especially if people are listening; and I even feel peculiar if I watch a stand-up comedian's DVD and I recognise some of the material they've used from previous shows. (Bill Bailey, one of my favourite comedians ever, is somewhat prone to this… though in his case he often starts off a routine in the same way as in a previous show and then veers off in a completely different direction, which is a very effective method of making the audience pay attention.)

With that in mind, then, I think my negative response to the two rhythms above may well be nothing more than me simply wishing that people would be a bit more creative when they're banging on things rather than using these age-old rhythms that have seemingly been passed down from generation to generation for the sole purpose of irritating people like me.

Or there may simply not be a reason at all. It is an irrational annoyance, after all.

Basically, what I'm trying to say is very simple: if you bang on my door using one of the above rhythms, I will not be held responsible if I accidentally end up banging on your face using the other. With a hammer.

1118: My 1,118th Blog Post Can't Be This Cute

Anime is full of surprises and frequently subverts your expectations, prejudices and preconceptions. In few places is this more apparent than in the recent show Oreimo, also known as Ore no Imouto ga Konna ni Kawaii Wake ga Nai or, literally in English, My Little Sister Can't Be This Cute.

Now, with a title like that, you'd be forgiven for thinking that this show is one of two things — or perhaps both. One: moe moe happy funtimes featuring a wacky little sister running around being cute. Two: incestuous "sister complex" story in which male protagonist ends up falling for his little sister through various shenanigans they get up to together. While I can't speak for number two in the show as a whole — I've only watched four episodes so far, so I'm still half-expecting them to pull the frequently-used "but they're not blood relations!" trope out of the bag (please don't spoil it even if that is the case!) — number one couldn't be further from the truth. Far from being a wacky show about nothing in particular as I expected it would be, Oreimo is, it turns out, an oddly personal show about being true to oneself and accepting each others' idiosyncrasies.

The concept is fairly straightforward. The main character Kyosuke is a 17-year old high school student who has had a somewhat strained relationship with his 14-year old sister Kirino for some time now. The reasons why they have been struggling aren't explained, at least at the start of the show, but it's clear that there's a certain degree of tension between them, whether that be the usual case of siblings resenting one another or something more. Kirino is a model student — she's pretty, she's popular, she gets good grades and she's a top athlete — and she also makes a lot of money doing modelling work for various catalogues and magazines.

But she has a secret.

Early in the first episode, Kirino makes a bold move. She comes to Kyosuke's room in the middle of the night, wakes him up and confesses something that she's been hiding for a long time: she's a secret otaku with a hidden closet full of anime, manga, doujinshi and eroge — all paid for with her modelling earnings — with a particular focus on one particular (fictional) magical girl show, and also on anything related to little sisters. Kyosuke initially isn't sure how to react, but it becomes clear that Kirino wants his help, even though her own pride and somewhat tsundere nature prevents her from stating this outright. He agrees to help her work out how to handle her secret "addiction" and figure out what to do with her life, because the stress of leading a "double existence" is starting to take its toll on her, as she feels uncomfortable showing the world who she really is.

As the series progresses, Kirino learns to make friends who are into her secret hobby, and comes to trust them. Kyosuke watches with some degree of pride as he sees his little sister starting to open up and be herself, but it isn't an easy ride — particularly when her two worlds start to collide as the siblings' parents and Kirino's non-otaku friends start to find out what has been going on. Kirino faces constant judgement and scorn from people who look down upon her hobby, and has a habit of becoming defensive and lying as her first reaction, often leaving Kyosuke to take the fall — something which he usually resigns himself to without complaining, even when it involves (as it frequently does) him being kicked in the testicles.

When it comes down to it, though, Kirino will often (eventually) stand up for herself and say what she believes in; she's passionate about her hobby, and over time begins to accept the fact that there will always be people out there who will judge her for it — often without knowing anything about it. Kyosuke, meanwhile, comes to understand his little sister a bit better, and also becomes something of a focal point for all her friends and acquaintances when various problems arise.

The nice thing about Oreimo that I've seen so far is that, a little like the excellent series Welcome to the NHK, it deals with subject matter that divides opinion but does so without being judgemental or preachy about it. You don't get the impression from watching the show that it specifically wants you to think that being an otaku is either okay or that it is vile and shameful; it simply presents things the way they are, places a strong focus on the concepts of people's "public" and "private" faces, and others' reactions to those faces. Far from being wacky, silly fun times, it's actually proven so far to be an interesting, very human story that doesn't hide behind moe shenanigans despite having, as the title suggests, a super-cute female lead. (It could probably do without some of the occasional curiously-angled shots of said super-cute female lead's bum, admittedly, but… well, there's not much you can do about that, really.)

Anyway. Thus far I've been enjoying it a lot, and am looking forward to seeing how it continues. Further reports will undoubtedly follow.

1115: Twittertwat

Quite a few people I know have quit Twitter in the last year or so. A few of them have also come back again, and some have gone through this process more than once, but a few have gone, never to return, either. Fortunately, in the cases of people I'm actually interested in staying in touch with, I have alternative means of contacting them, and Twitter was only ever a way of easily sending short messages to them — a global texting service, if you will.

I use Twitter a lot, for engaging in conversations, posting links to my work and just generally being part of the global community. But over the past few weeks, I'm starting to understand why increasing numbers of people are jumping ship.

The experience is, of course, as with so much else on the Internet, exactly what you make of it, and I've taken fairly ruthless control of my experience by simply blocking people I find objectionable and/or annoying. Not necessarily people who are being abusive — I appear to be a relatively inoffensive tweeter that doesn't attract trolls compared to some — but people whom I just don't want to hear from. (If only real life were that simple.)

Even with doing this, though, it's still increasingly frustrating when the entirety of my timeline is taken up by some sort of snark on one subject or another. Today, there were several subjects — a report by Edge about the next-generation Microsoft console which framed a bunch of rumours as if they were confirmed facts; the ECA announcing that HipHopGamer was going to be their new ambassador; and something about J. J. Abrams and Valve. I've only really dipped in and out of Twitter today, and the snark in relation to all of these things was unbearable then, so I can't imagine how irritating it would have been had I had a client open all day.

This is the thing, though. There's nothing really fundamentally wrong with having strong opinions on matters such as those mentioned above — which will, of course, mean nothing to people who don't follow the games industry — but Twitter is not a particularly good place in which to have discussions about those opinions. It's fine for raising awareness of something — perhaps posting a link to a relevant story — but when people start trying to have "debates" about these things, it all sort of starts to fall apart a bit, really. Any pretext of rational discussion is inclined to quickly go out of the window in favour of short, snappy arguments, and the ease with which a tweet can be posted means that things are often spoken in haste without any real thought. To me, the very benefit of arguing a point using the written word is that you can take your time over it and consider it carefully; not so if you're in a Twitter argument.

I haven't been involved in any of these discussions/debates/arguments as I know how they inevitably go. I also know the people to avoid engaging with by now — those who seem to take offense at everything it's even slightly possible to take offense to. Even though I don't engage with them, though — and in many cases, as mentioned above, have blocked them — it's still exhausting to feel that there are certain subjects which just can't be broached; certain turns of phrase which can't be used; certain words which are off-limits. (And I'm not talking about anything explicitly offensive like racial epithets or anything like that; I'm talking about words which these people specifically choose to interpret using the worst possible meaning rather than the tone and context in which they were intended.)

I'm rambling a bit, I know, but the gist of the matter is that this week I've come closer to quitting Twitter altogether than I have ever done. Twitter has been an important part of my life for a long time, a key way in which I stay in touch with a lot of my international friends and the means through which I first met Andie, but I'm beginning to feel that "honeymoon" period is over. It doesn't feel like the warm, welcoming, positive community it used to be. Perhaps that's just the people I follow, and I'm long overdue for a ruthless unfollow-and-block session — or perhaps people really are being more snarky than they were. Either way, the negativity is starting to get to me a bit.

It's doubtful that I will quit Twitter at any point in the near future — I still have too many friends who use it as their primary means of communication, and it's still the best way to quickly and easily share things that probably don't really need to be shared with the world — but I just found it mildly interesting that this is the closest I've ever come to actually ditching it.

1114: Amazing Discoveries

Amazing discovery of the day: my Nespresso "Aeroccino" milk frothing device not only heats and froths milk suitable for both lattes and cappuccinos (it's all to do with how wibbly-wobbly your whisk is, apparently), it also makes a killer milkshake.

I've had a pot of Mars milkshake mix lurking in my cupboard for months now — it even moved house with us back in December — but I've not had that much of it despite it being yummy because apparently I am crap at mixing powder-based milkshakes by hand. They almost inevitably come out either lumpy or not actually tasting of the thing they're supposed to taste of, and are thus infinitely more disappointing than a milkshake you'd pay well over the odds for in a single-portion bottle. (I say "single portion" — most of the nutrition info in the side of bottles of things like Mars milkshakes and Frijj seems to imply that a "normal" person would drink no more than half the bottle in one go. Who does that?)

As an experiment, then, I decided to use the Aeroccino, because I knew it had a "cold" mode that does all the stirry-stirry business, but doesn't do all the heaty-heaty business like it normally does. I plopped in the appropriate amount of milk and a few scoops of the Mars milkshake mix, then pressed and held the button until it went blue rather than the usual red… then sat and hoped that it didn't blow up. There's no reason why it should blow up simply from having a bit of powder in it as well as the usual milk, but, well, I was still doing something with it that you're not really supposed to.

What do you know? It made a perfect, lump-free milkshake that actually tasted like Mars milkshake without being all powdery and horrible. I call that a victory. It didn't even gum up the stirry thing with goopy half-dissolved milkshake mix, meaning it could just be rinsed out ready for the bajillion cups of coffee I will almost inevitably consume over the course of tomorrow. (I'm having a bit of a caffeine crash as we speak — I've largely been drinking strong black "Lungos" today and thus have been a bit wired for most of the evening.)

I find it oddly satisfying to use culinary implements for purposes other than that which they were originally intended. (Get your mind out of the gutter, you filthy pervert.) That and doing weird things with stock foods. Adding hot sauce to reheated bolognese. Layering a slice of beef under the cheese of cheese on toast. (I call this "Deluxe Cheese on Toast".) Dipping Bovril on toast into tomato soup. (Seriously, try this, it's delicious. Assuming you like Bovril on toast, obviously.) Making weird sandwiches. (I put a whole roast dinner — well, the leftovers thereof — in a sandwich once, and you really haven't lived until you've had a pie sandwich.)

I have no idea where I'm going with this post, to be perfectly honest. I think it's probably best that I just stop writing here as it's nearly 1am and I'm quite tired. I seem to have fallen into habits of staying up quite late again. I should probably try and kick that, because it makes it difficult to get up in the morning. Oh well.

See you tomorrow.

1111: Oneoneoneone

So today is my one thousand and eleventh daily post on this blog, and the… errr, hang on… (*counts*… 11, 22, 33, 44, 55, 66, 77, 88, 99, 111, 222, 333, 444, 555, 666, 777, 888, 999… 1111) 19th time that all the digits in my post number have been identical, something which, coincidentally, will not happen again for another one thousand one hundred and eleven days.

This feels like it should be significant somehow, but in reality, well, it just isn't. It's just another arbitrary post number on a relatively unremarkable day. Regardless, since it feels like it should be something significant, I shall use this post as a permanent (well, as permanent as anything on the Web is) record of exactly what happened today, Saturday the 2nd of February 2013. (Yes, I know the post date probably says February 3rd, but that's because I played Hyperdimension Neptunia for too long and drifted all the way past midnight… as usual. I'm sure you're used to it by now.)

This morning I woke up rather late because I'd stayed up rather late the previous night reading my current visual novel fix, a rather compelling (if also rather wordy) tale called Kira Kira. I'll save any discussion of Kira Kira for another day and instead point you to my "first impressions" post over on Games are Evil if you're curious, since that's not relevant to what went on today.

Andie and I eventually got up, had some breakfast (bacon and omelette; Andie added some chilli peppers and onions to hers but branded it ultimately disappointing due to the lack of "kick" that said peppers had; I had a plain one as my digestive tract was already on fire following a spectacularly spicy dhansak at my friend Tim's on Thursday night) and contemplated what the day would hold.

Andie decided that she was going to look at new cars, as her trusty Nissan Micra "Ratty" had been starting to develop a few flaws and also had an impressive (though purely cosmetic) dent on the rear-left door. (It wasn't her fault, but it would have cost several hundred quid to fix.) I was going to spend the day editing the much-delayed Squadron of Shame horror-themed podcast, but was requested to come along for moral support on the car hunt, so I agreed. I've never bought a car myself before, and Andie hadn't done it "solo" before, either, so I understood her hesitance to go alone.

We took a drive down to a local used car dealership that was basically a big hangar-type building full of used cars of various descriptions. Andie took a bright red Peugeot 207 and a white VW Polo out for a spin; the Polo was a nicer car but was also several thousand quid more expensive, so that was eliminated from the running after some deliberations. Despite the best attempts of the newbie salesman and his boss double-teaming us and trying to convince us to buy a car there and then, Andie told them firmly that we would be taking a look at some other places before we made a decision. ("Why?" asked the boss guy, clearly only half-jokingly.)

We went and grabbed some lunch at The Crown, a pub I used to frequent as a student at Southampton University. It hasn't changed at all, though the prices have probably gone up a bit. We both had a "Crown Inn Burger", which is a burger with two toppings of your choice; Andie went for chili con carne and egg, I went for bacon and cheese. It was tasty — they do good burgers, so if you happen to find yourself in there, I recommend them. (I also recommend the "hill" or "mountain" of nachos, which are super-tasty.)

Following lunch, we went to a strip of car dealerships in the middle of town, opposite Ikea. There was a Hyundai place that looked like it also sold Renaults, a Honda place and a Ford place. Andie was particularly keen to look at the Fords, and I've had reasonably good experiences with Fords in the past too. (Apart from the fact that my Fiesta blew up on the way to work one day, and the Escort I subsequently had just flat-out died one day for no apparent reason.)

We took a look in the Hyundai place first, and were immediately accosted by a smug, smarmy salesman who completely ignored everything Andie said ("I'm interested in a used car," she said. "Here's a brand new Hyundai," he said. "Fuck you," we thought.) who showed us a car that we weren't really interested in. Then we tried the Ford garage and discovered that it closed at lunchtime on Saturdays, which seemed enormously counter-productive from a "we want to sell lots of cars" perspective, then discovered that this was apparently not an unusual practice, since the Honda place was also closed.

Eliminating both Honda and Ford from our deliberations, we moved on to a dedicated Peugeot dealership on the very far side of the Southampton urban area. I was flagging a bit and getting a bit depressed and frustrated by this point, but we stuck it out. Andie took a diesel-based Peugeot 207 out for a spin and really liked it, so after a bit of pondering we decided that it would make a good new car. Andie did a bit of haggling (and judging by how little they argued, could have probably got away with more, but it was late in the day and we were tired) and we agreed to part-exchange both Andie's current car and my elderly Peugeot 106 (which I really don't need any more) against the new vehicle. (The trade-in value on the 106 is considerably better than the cash prices I've been quoted for selling it to places like We Buy Any Car and whatnot, so it seemed foolish not to do that, as we'll both use the new car.)

Then we came home, and I posted the first of two new columns on Games are Evil (the second came later) then settled down for a bit of Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2. I'm closing in on the end of my second playthrough. I still haven't decided if I'm actually going to play it through seven times, but it's seriously tempting, plus it will actually minimise some of the "grinding" required to get certain specific endings, so I might; skipping events I've already seen lots of times cuts the total time down considerably, and fights are over in a flash when your main fighters are level 90+ and equipped with beastly weaponry. Man, I love that game.

Then, seeing the time stamp on my save game, I figured I should probably come and write this. So I did. After I click "Publish" I'm going to bed. Good night. Happy oneoneoneone day.

1108: Countdown to Internet

We finally get Proper Internet installed in our new flat tomorrow. If you are, at this point, scratching your head and pondering how on Earth I am writing this post when I do not have Proper Internet installed in our new flat already, fortunate circumstances meant that our new neighbours have BT as their service provider and thus have part of their bandwidth set aside as a public hotspot. Because we're also with BT, it means that we're able to make use of this hotspot for free.

You may think that sounds ideal, and it's certainly been better than nothing — without it I'd have spent about a billion pounds on working from coffee shops by now, or have struggled on with a data-capped 3G dongle — but it's had its share of annoyances. The main issue is that our neighbours' router is just slightly too far away for a reliable connection on devices like the iPhone and iPad — it's been fine on my laptop, but my Mac steadfastly refuses to stay connected for more than five minutes at a time. Since my day job requires me to download a lot of stuff from the App Store, I need my phone to have a reliable connection, because apps over a certain size are impossible to download over a mobile data connection — and besides, my mobile data connection has a bandwidth cap, too, which I hit last billing month thanks to the very issues I'm describing here.

The other irritant is the hotspot's "fair use policy", which means that "unlimited" use is, in fact, not unlimited at all — instead, once you hit a certain number of minutes used on your account (cumulative between all devices which have logged in using those details) you get put in a special Naughty Corner for people who use the Internet too much, and disconnected without warning every half an hour. This is especially infuriating if you've been typing an article into a web-based content management system such as WordPress, idly hit Publish without remembering to check if the connection is still active and promptly run the risk of losing all your work. (Fortunately, Chrome seems to cache the body of your text when this happens, but tends to lose headlines, tags and that sort of thing.) I have taken to both copying the entire body of my text before publishing and opening a new tab to any old site — usually Facebook, since I only have to type the letter "F" into the address bar in Chrome for it to suggest that to me and it loads quickly — just to make sure the connection hasn't gone tits-up.

It could, of course, be significantly worse. I've been re-reading some old issues of PC Zone recently, and they hail from the pre-broadband days when getting unlimited Internet access via your phone line was a new and exciting thing, but most people were struggling on with 0845 numbers that charged them the same rate as a local phone call while they were online. The letters page of one issue features a letter from someone who wished that multiplayer-focused games would go away — not for the same reason people say this today (oversaturation) but because, in the UK at least, it was a relative minority of people who could play these games at a practical speed and without their phone bill going through the roof.

I remember vividly trying to get a two-player game of Quake going via a direct modem connection a while back, and it was just impossible to do so. And all the while I was trying to get this going, the phone line was tied up and pissing off my parents. (You young 'uns don't know you're born, I tellsya.) We got direct-connect games of Command and Conquer and Red Alert going a few times, but Quake continually eluded us. It wasn't until I got to university and managed to figure out a way to use our free phone calls between rooms in our hall of residence to fake a Windows network connection that I was able to play a PC-based first-person shooter against another person for the first time. (Not coincidentally, those days spent playing Half-Life against my flatmates Sam and Chris are some of my fondest gaming memories of all time.)

Still, as I say… Proper Internet tomorrow. You don't realise how much you miss it until it's not there. It's such a big part of everyone's daily life now that the fact we used to only be able to use the Internet for short periods of time at specific times of day (phone calls were cheaper after 6pm!) is all but unthinkable. Nowadays, I'm bitching about the fact I can't watch Netflix and Crunchyroll over breakfast.

The perils of living in The Future, I guess.

1107: The Common Room

When I look back on past experiences, as I am often wont to do, one of the times I look back on most favourably was my time at sixth form. (For Americans, that's the equivalent of whatever you call 16-18 education, and is optional; those who want to go straight in to work or training or whatever can leave school at 16.)

There are plenty of reasons that sixth form was one of the happier times of my life, most significantly being the fact that all of the dickheads who had made a large proportion of my school life a misery left at 16, never to be seen again. I wasn't sorry to see them gone, particularly as their non-presence meant that I was left with just people I actually liked.

Our sixth form was based on the same campus as our secondary school, you see — it was part of the school, in fact — which meant that it was a lot smaller than a dedicated sixth form college and thus the sort of environment where it was completely possible to be friends with (or at least know) everyone. This was a pleasant feeling; it brought a sense of comfortable familiarity to the daily grind, and it meant that you were rarely, if ever, thrown into an uncomfortable social situation whereby you were forced to work with people you'd never seen before in your life. (I know some people have no problem with that, but as you probably know if you've been reading this a while, I most definitely am not one of them.)

I enjoyed the learning side of sixth form. The teachers were far more informal, willing to let us call them by their first names and, in some cases, confiding in us about students lower down the school that they just didn't like. (One of our teachers pretty much believed that no-one under the age of 15 had any right to exist in public, and could often be seen tutting and shaking his head out of the window at some particularly rambunctious youngsters. Having spent some time at the chalkface myself, I now understand exactly where he was coming from.)

We learned interesting stuff, too. Learning A-Level Sociology, for example, was a completely different matter to learning GCSE Integrated Humanities, which was basically the same subject. We had hardcore textbooks and we wrote essays that included names and dates in brackets, like proper academics.

A-Level English was great, too — I enjoyed the language side far more than the literature side, I have to say — and we got to study all manner of interesting topics like the way children acquire language, pidgins and patois and even taboo language. There was a certain degree of novelty in being able to get away with writing the word "fuck" in an essay.

I think by far my fondest memories, though, are from the downtime between classes, during free periods and those times when we were avoiding going to the utterly pointless General Studies class. (I got an A in its final exam having attended one lesson out of two years' worth.) We'd hang out, we'd eat rather poor baguettes from the coffee shop at the recreation centre on the school campus, and we'd mess around with the "brand new" (rather battered, old and crusty) computers that the (actually) brand new sixth form centre had been provided with.

The computers were a source of constant amusement despite the fact that none of them were connected to the Internet. (The Internet was still in its relative infancy in those days, and having a school-wide network for students to use was unheard of.) The gentleman in charge of the computers was a chap called Adrian, who couldn't have been that much older than us and clearly didn't know the first thing about computers. He'd often berate us for completely nonsensical misdemeanours, and warn us of bizarre things like the fact that dropping paper down the back of the printer would supposedly make it catch fire. (Uh, no.)

We took great delight at tormenting Adrian at every opportunity. He sort of deserved it, because he was an interfering busybody who regularly got in the way of people actually trying to do useful stuff with the computers, and his overly-superior attitude (and complete lack of ICT knowledge) made him a worthwhile opponent. Consequently, we often engaged in various acts of light cyber-terrorism to mess with him. We'd set passwords on the screensavers, set all the computers to play a full-screen video of a chimp having a wee in its mouth (I think it may have been this one, though obviously this was long before YouTube, meaning someone must have brought it in on a floppy disk or CD — I never knew who) before subtly unplugging the mouse and keyboard, and on one memorable occasion we spent lunchtime making a complete game in Klik & Play called Cock Wars, which featured two crudely-drawn phalluses battling it out for intergalactic spunky supremacy, then left it running on every machine as afternoon classes started.

Our crowning achievement in trolling Adrian had to be what we did on our very last day at sixth form. Someone had discovered how easy it was to pop off the keys on the cheap and nasty computer keyboards that were hooked up to our cheap and nasty keyboards, so we had the bright idea of leaving Adrian a little message on one keyboard, just as our way of saying goodbye. Said message ended up being "BOLLOCKSPANTSHOMOCOCK" where once there had been a normal keyboard layout. You'll notice there are quite a few letter "O"s in that little sequence; this, of course, meant that we had to borrow keys from a variety of other keyboards, including those from different rooms. Sadly, we never got to see his reaction, and the Instamatic photo we took of the keyboard turned out to be far too blurry to make out the letters. Boo.

I do sort of feel a bit bad, looking back on those days — I know what it's like to be tormented by teenage charges — but then I remember how irritating Adrian was and how he would completely refuse to listen to someone who actually did know what they were talking about when it came to computers. He was completely unable to listen to reason, and… look, he was just a bit of a dick, all right? You'll have to take my word on this one; most of you will know I don't dislike people lightly. Besides, we never did anything that actually damaged the computers; the only incident that would have inconvenienced him at all would have been the keyboard thing.

Anyway, yeah. Sixth form was good times. I miss those days, but they're a long time ago now.