#oneaday, Day 142: Erraticism

Things haven't been sorted back at my place yet. A letter came through the door today informing me that the electricity would be off, and the water would probably be going off at some point too. Joy! This means I pretty much have to live like a hobo for the next few days.

I'd be less embittered about the whole thing if I hadn't looked out of the window this morning and seen the big hole which the electric company had dug and no-one in it at all. I would have thought in what probably qualifies as an "emergency" (albeit not one which is directly threatening lives) that the people in charge of fixing it might be a bit more interested in, you know, fixing it.

The letter also mentioned that there would be police patrolling around the site. So I was heartened to see two children playing inside the hole that the electric company had dug, obviously unsupervised by both their parents and the conspicuously absent police.

So that's all good. I've not slept in my own bed for the last two nights. But I don't mind, really. Of course I don't.

Of course I fucking do. I'd like to be able to, you know, do stuff in the place that is supposed to be my home but which day by day is feeling less and less like it. I know I'm going to have to get out there at some point but being jobless at the moment I really don't have anywhere to go just yet. It's not through lack of trying, either.

Today was "one of those days" when everything feels like it goes badly. I got up early as I was sleeping on a friend's floor and he had to go out to work. This wasn't a "bad thing", I knew it was going to happen. But when I got outside, it started raining, always a bad omen. I wandered into town to find some breakfast, and it was still raining. I spoke to a friend who was also having a terrible morning, and it quickly became apparent that today was not going to be a good day.

So I was unsurprised when I wandered back to my flat to check on things that the electricity was still off. More to the point, the people in charge had not had the foresight to remember that electronic door locks don't work when there is no electricity. Fortunately, a chav who had had the foresight to break the basement door had left a way into the building, fortunately.

I went out again, took some photos, wandered around aimlessly, came back. Still no power. Then the power came back for a minute. Then it went away again. Now here I am.

Forgive me for the not-very-interesting posts. But I'm pissed off. Hopefully normal business will soon resume.

#oneaday, Day 141: Wet Feet

I was just about to settle down to write a blog earlier tonight when I was unceremoniously informed that it would probably be for the best if I vacated my flat.

Let's rewind an hour or two here. I was about to settle in for a d… to have some alone time in the bathroom when I realised I was out of toilet paper. So a trip to the shop was on the cards. I gathered the universal "going outside kit" of money, keys and phone and went outside my flat.

When I got into the lobby area I could hear gushing water. I figured it was just the rain outside intensifying, but I needed a dump and no thunderstorm was going to stop me in acquiring the appropriate equipment for said activity.

I opened the door and noticed it wasn't raining. Not only that, but I couldn't hear the gushing water outside.

"That's odd," I thought. I headed back inside and followed the source of the sound. It was coming from the basement of my block.

At the bottom of the stairs, the floor was ankle-deep in water, and said water appeared to be gushing out from behind a white, locked door which, it later became clear, is an electrical cupboard.

I went back into my flat and phoned the useless estate management company who are in charge of the development. I was put on the phone with a spectacularly chavvy-sounding gentleman who offered that he could either get someone to come down tomorrow ("It's flooding," I pointed out.) or tonight, and that there "might be a charge" for an "emergency callout".

Fortunately, as it transpired, there was a representative of this festival of incompetence already on site for some reason. He came and knocked on everyone's door and informed us that they were going to turn the electricity off as the water was getting at the fuses and that was bad. He also helpfully informed us that he had absolutely no idea how long the work to fix it was going to take.

Well, thanks for that.

That, then, dear reader, is why I am lying on the floor of my friend Sam's house blogging on my phone. Because Trinity Estates, who think "fixing a pipe" means "putting some duct tape on it" have outdone themselves.

I guess I should be grateful that they are at least fixing it. But to not be able to do stuff in my own home for an unspecified amount of time is not exactly what I need right now.

#oneaday, Day 140: Being An Asshole

Every time there is a "new advance" in AI for video games, the first question a lot of people ask is "how human is it?" How does it compare to playing against a real, actual, human person? A gaming-related Turing Test, if you will. And the answer is always "it's not very human". There's one reason for this – computers can't be assholes.

I was playing Blur multiplayer tonight and the one thing that struck me is how much of an asshole players online can be. That's not a criticism, by the way. In fact, the sheer assholeness of a lot of online Blur players makes multiplayer races a pretty thrilling experience. And the AI players in the single-player, while frustrating, aren't assholes. They never drop a mine directly behind a powerup so you grab the powerup and then explode. They never use a Barge to knock you off a cliff. They never swerve into you at the start line and bash you into a wall. They never wait until the home straight to launch a mine right up your arse and sail past in the last half-a-second of the race. They never park sideways across a narrow bit of track just to get in the way.

This sort of creative sadism which online Blur players have developed is what makes the multiplayer so much more appealing than the single-player mode. It's really interesting to see the tactics that people have obviously developed independently without any prompting from the game. The "trapping a powerup" thing, for example. The AI players never do that. It's never suggested you do it in the loading-screen tips. But it's, when you think about it, a smart idea. Everyone is clamouring for powerups throughout every race. So why not make the more desirable ones rather more difficult to get?

This is a different sort of assholeness to the kind of 13-year-olds who scream racist, homophobic abuse down their headsets during games of Modern Warfare 2 (which they shouldn't be playing anyway, but of course, that's another conversation) – this is a stubborn, passionate desire to win at any cost bar cheating, rather than a stubborn, passionate desire to be a dick. And it's fun. You can't help getting involved. Watch other people playing Blur and all you want to do is out-asshole them. Get someone with a carefully-placed mine, or accurately slam a backward-fired Shunt into their face while they're slipstreaming you and it's immensely satisfying.

In fact, Blur as a whole is set up for being an asshole. Take the social gaming features I discussed the other day. What possible reason could there be for posting information about how well you're doing other than to make other people think "I need to take that asshole down a peg or two"?

The reason, of course, that AI in single-player games being a perfectly accurate representation of a human is not necessarily a desirable thing is this: sometimes we like to win. And if you're playing against 19 other assholes, most of whom are more of an asshole than you, very often you don't win. That's all very well, and competitive and so on… but if you're playing by yourself, you want to win, don't you? So that's why I can say with some confidence that I really, really hope AI doesn't ever improve to a level where it's indistinguishable from a human. Because I like to beat it sometimes. And I've played over 60 online races in Blur now… and won two of them!

#oneaday, Day 138: Days in the Sun

It was another gloriously sunny day today. It's easy to forget that England gets nice weather sometimes when an estimated 85% of our days are overcast.

Everyone is in a better mood in the sunshine. And, judging by the number of people in town, everyone skips work in the sunshine, too. I went to the park and sat in the sun for a bit and there were people from all walks of life all around. There was the chav in the open shirt who kept stroking his chest. There were the noisy, screechy girls. There were excited little kids on their half-term break headed for the playpark. And there was me.

Sitting in the sun is nice. There's something extremely pleasant about the weather being good enough for you to be able to sit (or indeed lie) on the grass and just relax. If it's been raining or snowing, or if it's cold, you'd never even think about lying down on the ground and dozing for a bit. But as soon as it gets a little bit sunny? Everyone seems to come down with narcolepsy. Well, except those people playing frisbee.

Lying in the grass is one of those things that triggers memories, particularly of being very young. I can remember lying on the grass at primary school on hot sunny days. Sometimes my friends and I would just lie there. Other times we'd talk. Other times still we'd attempt to do those stupid moves from P.E. that no-one ever does in real life. And on one memorable occasion, a friend became convinced that by doing a shoulderstand and "squeezing a bit", he could make himself fart at will. (He couldn't.)

Besides school, other grassy memories are mostly picnic-related. I have oddly strong memories of visiting the Imperial War Museum at Duxford and sitting in the grass having a picnic as we watched the planes take off, land and do various pieces of death-defying aerobatics. Thinking about it, I don't think we were actually sitting on the grass, more hanging around the car in deckchairs eating sandwiches. But sandwiches always taste better outside, as everyone well knows.

So it's been a nice day. A very nice day in fact. Even the fact that I clearly got a bit burnt judging by the tingling on my ears right now (either that or someone's talking about me) didn't detract from the niceness of the day. So that's good. Nice days are good. Nice days are much-needed. Nice days have been away for a long time, so it's, well, nice to see them again.

Let's hope this lovely summery weather continues for some time, and that we see more in the way of girls in tiny shorts and less in the way of shirtless bald chavs staggering through parks with cans of Tennents Extra clutched in their desperate sweaty gorilla-hands. And maybe some English people can get a proper tan instead of feeling the need to pointlessly slather themselves with orange paint.

#oneaday, Day 137: Flower Girl

I am almost falling asleep on my keyboard here, so I'll keep this brief to prevent falling asleep with all the letters of the keyboard printed backwards across my face. I can barely keep my eyes open. I'm not sure why I'm so tired, though I have had people over this evening and I spent the first part of my day cleaning up in preparation for said visitors. We had a lovely evening, by the way, thanks for asking.

Earlier in the day I did get a moment to record one more piano piece. I posted it on Tumblr earlier but I'm not sure who got the chance to hear it. A few people did, I guess, and it even got a couple of reblogs. But I thought for those people who don't "do" Tumblr, I'd post it here too.

The song in question is Aerith, or Aeris, or Flower Girl or whatever you want to call it. It's the piece from Final Fantasy VII that makes everyone cry. There are two reasons for this – one, it's a beautiful piece of music, and two, the most memorable point of the game in which this piece of music is heard is where Aerith/s dies. (Oh come ON! Surely everyone who is ever going to play Final Fantasy VII knows that by now.) This scene is widely regarded by many as one of the first times where computer games genuinely started to encourage emotional investment in their narratives – at least on consoles. Developers of adventure games on PC had been trying this for a long time already, but Final Fantasy VII was the first mainstream console game which people admitted crying to.

It's a cliché and a bit of a joke these days, of course, but it was my brother telling me about the sheer emotion in the game that made me originally want to pick up Final Fantasy VII. I'd never touched an RPG prior to that point and had no idea what HP, MP and Limit Breaks were. My life was shortly to change forever.

The piece of music itself, though; it's always held a peculiarly personal meaning to me, and I can't pin down why that is. I think it possibly may be something to with the fact that the older Final Fantasy games allowed you to rename your characters, so in my game, it wasn't "Aerith" dying, it was someone I knew. This made it all the more traumatic.

When I play the piece nowadays, I don't necessarily think of someone dying. But I do always find myself thinking of someone. I always feel that the character of the piece represents gentle, total, unconditional love and/or affection towards someone. So inevitably while playing it I find myself thinking of someone special to me in some way. The exact person who comes to mind has changed many times over the years, but the reason for my thinking of them hasn't. They are important.

iPhone users, click here to hear the track. Everyone else, use the Flash player below.

#oneaday, Day 136: Massive Pianist

Some more music for you today as it's awfully late and I feel like I've been busy all day today, even though the only thing I achieved in the daytime was to buy two shirts which actually look good on me. Oh, and record these two pieces, of course.

A bit of background on these pieces for those who aren't familiar with them. Final Fantasy has been a big part of my life for many years – at least since Final Fantasy VII came out. I believe I've talked about the fond memories I have associated with this game in the past – the long, hot summer days, the thirty-six hour playing stint which culminated with my friend Woody and I suffering strange hallucinations of items that didn't exist in the game – but the thing that's stuck with me longer than the game itself is its music. FFVII was the first time I really noticed game music as a positive thing and, just to make this even more clichéd, it was One Winged Angel which impressed me the most.

After playing FFVII to death, I tracked down the previous games in the series, which I'd never experienced before, not really knowing what an RPG was before that point. I discovered that they, too, had great music, and not only that, there were piano arrangements available.

After a considerable amount of time searching, I managed to track down some dodgy scans of the piano scores for IV, V and VI. Later, I acquired genuine copies of the VII, VIII and IX books. The arrangements of the pieces are gorgeous – proper piano arrangements in a variety of styles rather than simple transcriptions. I've been playing them ever since and everyone seems to think that they're very "me".

Persona is a bit different. I came to Persona with the third game in the series a year or two back thanks to the Squadron of Shame. We even did a podcast about it. What struck nearly all of us about that series was its peculiarly quirky and enormously Japanese soundtrack. I was very interested to discover earlier this year that both Persona 3 and Persona 4 have piano scores available too. Unfortunately, they're not nearly as well-arranged as the Final Fantasy scores, but they certainly sound good enough – for some pieces at least. The J-hip-hop tracks don't sound particularly good on a piano, so there is no way I am ever playing any of them in public.

Much like Final Fantasy, the Persona games hold a very fond place in my heart. Rather than having memories attached to them, though, I found the stories of both games to be very emotionally resonant. I identified a great deal with many of the characters, as Persona deals a lot with friendships, personal identity and figuring out who you are, both in yourself and in relation to other people. While I can't point a fake gun at my head and summon a mythical beast to do my bidding, I do at least understand what some of the characters have been through, and empathise with others. It's rare that a game is written well enough for that to happen, so both games hold a special place in my heart.

Without further ado, then, here's two more pieces for your delectation. Just like last time, iPhone users can click on the titles to hear the tracks.

*pauses* I wish I'd remembered to upload these tracks before I started writing this. *drums fingers* Tra la la la la…

Aha! They're done. Here. *Enjoy* the *sauce*. And yes, I know there's a couple of bum notes. I was in a hurry. 🙂

The Oath from Final Fantasy VIII

Heaven from Persona 4

#oneaday, Day 135: Blurred Socialization

"Social games" are crap. There, I've said it. Now everyone else can breathe a sigh of relief that the elephant in the room has been well and truly pointed out.

But why are they crap? Well, the main reason is that they just aren't very fun to either play as games or use as a means of socialising. I've tried out Mafia Wars and We Rule in particular. And neither of them are very fun.

Both of them involve a lot of clicking and waiting. Click on a button to complete a task. Wait for something to happen… in real time. While you wait, why not spam your friends to "help" you by clicking on the same button that you did? You'll both get XP! Yay XP! Of course your level means little more than how long you have bothered to waste your time playing what is basically an Access database, but that's beside the point.

The social angle is flawed too. There's no interaction. You can request "help" from other players but there's no means of actually playing together concurrently. In some games you can't even send messages to each other.

Then came Blur. Blur single-handedly shows the correct way to develop a good social game: by building a good game first, then a social network around it. Too many other titles do this the other way round, and that's what causes them to be the shallow, meaningless garbage that they are.

Blur is different, though. Even without the social features it would be a great racer featuring the "why hasn't anyone done this before?" combination of realistic racing and Mario Kart-style powerups. But add in the ability to taunt friends publicly via Facebook and Twitter, not to mention the incredibly solid "Friend Challenge" system, and you've got a winning experience on your hands.

Playing Blur is actually remarkably akin to logging into something like Facebook. Starting the game greets you with a "Previously on Blur" feature showing you the next milestones you might reach, a bit like Facebook's News Feed shows you recent happenings. Then you might want to check your messages, so you look at the Friend Challenges screen. You see that three of your friends have challenged you to beat their times, so you while away a short while beating them senseless… or not. Then you take on some of the single-player, and achieve something you know none of your friends have, so you post it to Facebook. Then… the list goes on. All the while you're having a good time playing a great game AND sharing the experience with friends.

So, social game developers? Please stop being satisfied with the derivative shit you're coming out with. The shit you are deriving your new shit from wasn't very good in the first place. So actually hire someone who has played a video game before to design your game, then build the social features around it.

Rant over. I'm off to play Blur.

#oneaday, Day 134: Busy Days

Hello everyone! Apologies for the late hour. It's been a genuinely busy day today, despite it being a Bank Holiday (or Memorial Day if you want to be all American about it).

My day started with waking up several times, snoozing my alarm and then waking up again. The last snooze inexplicably went on a lot longer than the other ones so I had a minor panic when I woke up the last time, because I actually needed to get up today.

Why? I hear you ask. Well, today was my first performance in public for ages. What? I hear you ask. For those of you who don't know, I've been playing the piano for quite a long time now. Since the age of five, in fact. Which makes it… a long time that I've been playing. I haven't performed in public for quite a while, though, and my friend Sam assures me that he'd never heard me play in public before. I'm convinced otherwise, but he's very insistent on this matter. I know he certainly didn't see the last piano performance I did at university, which was a duet performance with one of the strangest people I've ever had the curious fortune to encounter in my life that was followed with one of the most memorable and terrifyingly inappropriate pub conversations I've ever experienced. Those who know who I'm talking about also know what the conversation was about. Those who don't… well, I feel it would be improper for me to discuss it here. Unless you really want to know, in which case leave me a comment and I'll tell you there.

So today was my first performance in public for ages. We've established that.

What did you play? I hear you ask. Demanding, aren't we? Perhaps you should stop asking so many questions and let me get on with my story because it's entirely possible I might have been about to tell you what I played. In fact, I'm half-tempted to just not tell you now.

Except that would make this blog entry run rather short and not allow me to include the lovely media that I'm about to. So I'll tell you.

A few years back, I discovered the Final Fantasy Piano Collections and managed to acquire most of them. Some of them I have the actual books of. The older ones I managed to track down some scans from the Internet. More recently, I managed to locate some piano scores for the music from Persona 3 and Persona 4. These respective series have some of my favourite music of all time, so I figured a public performance would be a good opportunity to spread the love and let other people know what they're all about. So that's what I did.

The event itself was part of Southampton's "Keys to the City" event, celebrating local arts and the piano in particular. Today's performance took place in the city's art gallery, tucked away on one side of the Civic Centre near the library. I got the impression not many people know about it. But there's a lovely Steinway piano there which has clearly been crying out to be used for some time, so my friend and ex-colleague Stephen McCleery of Retrograde Recordings helped to organise an event to give it a bit of attention.

Here's three of the pieces I performed. I'll be recording the others over the next few days, so there's a few posts ready to go if I'm short of inspiration!

If you're reading this on an iPhone, don't get pissy about the Flash audio players not working. I've been good enough to supply direct links to the files. Just click on the title. I'm good to you people. Not every blog would do that, you know.

Anyway… enjoy. More to come over the next few days.

Main Theme from Persona 4

Prologue from Final Fantasy

Velvet Room from Persona 3

#oneaday, Day 133: Lazy Days

Everyone has lazy days. Days when nothing – nothing – gets done. And sometimes there's not even a reason for getting nothing done. Just pure laziness. Or possibly your body telling your mind that it's quite comfortable where it is, thank you very much, and would it mind awfully if it just sat here and atrophied for a few hours KTHXBAI.

It starts innocently enough. You sit down on the sofa. Perhaps you wanted a quick breather. Perhaps you've just had a phone call that went on for so long that that pacing-around-the-room thing that everyone does with mobile phones got a bit tiresome. Perhaps you were about to watch some TV. The circumstances of how you got to the sofa are about to become completely irrelevant.

At some point during your blissful reverie, something of earth-shattering importance will occur to you. Perhaps there's a letter that you need to post today, or you're running out of toilet paper and the shop is closing early for refurbishment today, or maybe you're out of milk, or perhaps you actually have something useful to get on with. Whatever it is, your mind can't stop thinking about it. A feeling of lurking panic starts to set in. What if you really need to take a dump and there isn't enough toilet paper? There's no-one else in the house so you can't ask anyone else to go and fetch you some. Could you sink as low as using a towel or a newspaper? Or would you want to wash your shitty arse in the shower, like some sort of incontinent old person, only without a nurse to help you with the hideous process? The feeling of panic builds and you almost feel obliged to get up.

But no! Why should you get up? You've been working your arse off all week for little to no gratitude from the people that you work for. So you've earned this little sit down. You shouldn't feel obliged to do anything. So you don't. You say to yourself – possibly out loud – no. You are going to sit here until you're nice and relaxed, or at least until Top Gear has finished. Then and only then you might think about getting up to post that letter.

"But the post goes at 4pm, and it's 3.50 now," says your mind. "If you don't post that letter today, the council are going to charge you eight-hundred and fifty-four pounds for the privilege of another letter asking you where your eight-hundred and fifty-four pounds owed in money that they paid you by mistake actually is." You close your eyes and block out the whingeing and nagging that your own mind is setting about you with. This is your time. Besides, the postman will come again tomorrow, and you can always change the date on the letter to look like you posted it earlier and it actually got lost in the post and then feign ignorance when the council start hammering on your door and bringing the bailiffs round.

You decide to give up trying to be productive and you lean back on the sofa in a more relaxed posture. Perhaps your mouth falls open in an expression of gormless contentment. You stare into space for a little while as the light starts to fade outside and you wonder if you probably should get up and cook something, but you're not sure you can be bothered. You'd phone for pizza, but you don't have any cash, and ordering one with a debit card is always such a hassle because they always phone back and say it hasn't gone through and you think your card's been declined because you've got no money but it's actually them just typing the number in wrong and oh for heaven's sake being by yourself sucks and wouldn't it be much better if you had someone to talk to or cook dinner for? That might get you up off the damn sofa.

There are only two possible outcomes to this scenario once it gets to this point:

The first possibility is that you achieve victory over the soporific powers of the sofa, stand up and get something done. You post your letter, putting it right into the postman's hand just as he is emptying the postbox into his big bag. Then you go and buy toilet paper and milk and order a pizza. Your evening goes swimmingly well, and you collapse into bed satisfied that you have spent your day as productively as you possibly could, with a much-needed break in the middle for a little quiet time and reflection.

And the other possibility is, of course, death.

#oneaday, Day 132: Turnabout Mystery

Sometimes bad things happen. Sometimes these bad things are so bad that they cast you into an abyss so dark, you wonder if you'll see light again; an abyss so deep you doubt you'll ever escape; an abyss you didn't think existed but, as it happened, was opening beneath your feet before your very eyes, drawing you in silently, wordlessly, until the darkness enveloped you.

One such abyss claimed me a short while back. The details are, right now, unimportant. But I was deep in the darkness. I couldn't see light. I couldn't even feel the walls to stumble my way out by touch. I was lost, and fearing for my own salvation.

Sometimes good things happen. Sometimes these good things are so good that they cast a brilliant light into the very darkest places in your life. A light which heals; a light which bonds; a light which gives hope. That hope doesn't have to be a big hope. It can be something as simple as a kind word or a smile with a million unspoken words behind it. Sometimes this light, this hope, comes along and brings light into the darkness. It may not banish it, but it certainly makes the path which must be trodden clearer.

My abyss has been brightened by one such light. The details are, once again, unimportant. The darkness still lingers, waiting to claim me, but the light is there now. The hope to carry on, to endure, to survive. The way ahead, while it may wend and meander into the distance, at least is visible now.

I know not what challenges await me along this newly-lit path, or whether I will be able to stave off the darkness temporarily, or even whether I may leave it behind altogether. But the light, it is there, and it makes me smile a smile that has not been on my face for some time.

And I am grateful. Forever grateful for that light. For without light, there is only darkness. And a man who spends so long in darkness eventually becomes one with the darkness.

That is not the fate I wish upon myself. I follow the light where it leads me, and my journey begins anew.