Category: Personal and Opinion

Something Kinda Fishy

Hello! I'm back from a day in London that's left my feet aching. I really need some new shoes. The revolting sweatiness of my feet has all but destroyed the inner soles of most of my pairs of shoes. Nice. Anyway, sweaty feet and shoes that are falling to bits are not what today's entry is about.

We went to the London Aquarium, or the London Sea-Life Aquarium to give it its full title. It was Jane's birthday the other day and she decided a few weeks back that she wanted to come and see the fish. We'd seen some great displays of fish and underwater life at zoos in both Toronto and New York over the last year, and we'd resolved to go and see more things that were a little closer to home. After all, London is a little over an hour's train journey away, and there's tons of cool stuff there to see and do, even if you do have to deal with taking your life into your hands every time you cross a London street. That said, it's no worse than Italian streets, from my limited experience with them. Probably better.

First challenge of the day was, of course, trying to buy a train ticket from the machines at the station. You'd think this would be as easy as selecting "London" as your destination, indicating that yet, you would like to come back as well as go there, and then purchasing your ticket.

No.

Do you want a Standard Day Return? A Super Saver Off-Peak Day Return? A Mega Buster Super-Fantastic Awesome Only Valid For Three Minutes A Day Which You've Already Missed Day Return? All of these cost varying amounts of money. If you remember to book in advance they cost different amounts again – considerably less, usually, but that requires pre-planning. Which is, let's face it, not always on the cards.

Battle with the ticket machine won, we got on the train and headed to Waterloo before walking down to the South Bank to find the Aquarium. For my international readers unfamiliar with London, the South Bank of the River Thames is a pretty vibrant area that always has loads of things going on. There's a whole bunch of concert halls there which see everything from black tie classical performances to Video Games Live, several museums, lots of places to eat, the London Eye, boat trips, and today there appeared to be some sort of world culture event going on. This was mostly filled with stalls selling food, tat made to look faintly "ethnic" and, bizarrely, what looked like the opportunity to have one's photo taken with an African man. How odd.

But I digress. The Aquarium beckoned, and Jane had had the foresight to print out some of the 2 for 1 offers on this site, meaning the two of us effectively got to go in for half price. Or only one of us paid. Or however you want to look at it. We went in and immediately discovered that the London Sea-Life Aquarium do not have a very good toilet strategy. There is one toilet by the entrance, along with a sign saying that "The next toilets are 20-30 minutes into your journey" – so naturally, there was a huge queue, even before we'd got in. (Wee-d got in. Do you see what I… oh, never mind.)

The Aquarium itself was great. Plenty of huge fishtanks with lots of interesting fish from all over the world to see, including many from Britain, too, as well as some of the more exotic fish (and other… things) from tropical waters. And, of course, sharks.

I remember someone saying a while back that under the sea is one of the only places on earth where you legitimately get things that you can call "monsters". And it's true. There are things down there that would be terrifying to find yourself confronted with. Even the monsters of Lovecraft (themselves from beneath the waves) aren't that outlandish compared to some of the things that really do exist, particularly in the deep. It's interesting to see creatures that are just so completely alien in design and function to land-based creatures.

Take a jellyfish, for example. No brain, almost completely seethrough body and four balls that you can see in the middle of its body. Sorry, "gonads", to use the technical term. (I always find it amusing that "gonads" is a scientific term, particularly in light of this gentleman from British comic history) Weird shit. And certainly not something you'd want to wake up with on your face, for example. And sharks. They have big teeth. Sounds obvious, I know, but it's not until you see one up close in a big tank with glass windows that you realise quite how vicious those things look.

The other interesting thing I thought about while looking around is how easy it is to look at these creatures and see human characteristics in them. Sharks, for example, look pissed off all the time. Manta rays look like they enjoy flying out and surprising things like ghosts. There were a bunch of fish that looked like they were belming. And, of course, there's Happy Fish. Now, who knows whether or not these undersea things really are feeling these things that they look like they're feeling, but it's certainly fun (or the sign of an overactive imagination!).

The only disappointing thing about the Aquarium was the "Shark Walk", which is hyped as one of the big attractions there and I was assuming was one of those "glass tunnels" where you walk through the middle of a tank full of sharks. (The promotional picture I have posted at the top of this entry probably went some way to making me think this.) However, what it actually was turned out to be, essentially, the attic of the Aquarium with a glass floor. The sharks were quite a long way below where you stand, and the water was a bit murky. It was very disappointing, but the fact that you could see the same shark tank earlier in the tour of the place with much bigger windows made up for it.

It was a good trip, and I'd recommend it to anyone who, well, likes fish. I believe there's times when there are proper tours – there was some guy with a mildly annoying voice rabbiting on about sharks as we passed one area – but otherwise you can wander around and read the (relatively simple) information and quizzes scattered around the place. To be honest, it's quite pleasant just looking at the fish, even if you don't learn that much.

After the Aquarium, we wandered over to St. James's Park, which looks just like it does in Project Gotham Racing, only with more people and pelicans in residence. Yes, pelicans. The area in the centre of the park is set aside as a sort of "nature reserve", with a variety of non-native birds making their home their. There are pelicans, canada geese, other kinds of geese whose name I've forgotten and a whole bunch of other things there. Jane freaked out a bit when we noticed there was a pelican on the loose in the main part of the park. It was just wandering around. It wasn't causing any trouble, but it was amusing to see the people sitting on the grass look around and react with shock, fright or amusement. "OMG WTF PELICANZORZ", they seemed to say.

OMG WTF PELICANZORZ

Then we had a hot dog in the park, walked back to Waterloo via Trafalgar Square (which is much closer to Waterloo than I realised) and then caught the train home, accompanied by people who don't know where the volume control on their ringtones are. Now we're sitting watching The Cube. Well, I'm blogging too. But The Cube is on next to me.

So yes. A nice day. I'd recommend it, as I say, to anyone who likes fish.

Changing Course

Hello everyone and thanks for stopping by, as always!

In an effort to write more on this site, I've decided to change tack a little from past entries. This blog started as a purely personal blog and gradually morphed into mostly games-related stuff. And fair enough, it's a principal hobby of mine. But I have all these unused categories going free at the top of the page so I thought I'd branch out and try to write a bit more on some other topics to give all of you lovely readers the opportunity to get to know me a bit better in some other areas. Plus, you never know, I might even pick up some more readers along the way – this was clearly demonstrated a while back when I reviewed Haunted Stereo live at the Hobbit (cue Pingback on myself… 'cause no-one else ever links to me :)) and I met a whole bunch of fine new folks as a result.

So from this week forwards, this blog will be… a blog, as opposed to a games blog. You'll still find games writing here, of course, but there are plenty of other things I'd like to talk about. My last few video games articles have also been posted over on Bitmob, so do go check me out (and comment!) over there if you like what you see. You'll also see a couple of my articles on Good Old Games, which should be your first destination for picking up… well, good old games. Check out my articles on Rise of the Triad and Simon the Sorcerer.

Right. On to other matters.

My Dan and Charlie project that I discussed in my last post has been proceeding nicely. It's been fun to "roleplay" these two characters and imagine the situations they have been getting into and how they interact. In practice, it has also been an interesting experiment in separating out various facets of my own personality into two separate people. Those who know me well will have already spotted this, but I also think it's a potentially interesting way of telling a story from different perspectives. My research on the subject is admittedly limited, but does anyone know if anything similar has been done before, outside of ARGs such as Perplex City? (Perplex City is, I confess, where I got the idea from in the first place, although those characters' stories were rather less mundane) I'd be intrigued to see how other people have approached it.

That's it for now. Like I say, this change in approach is largely an excuse to get me writing more on a broader variety of different topics, so assuming I have a bit of self-discipline about this I'm sure I can find something interesting to say on a semi-regular basis. I hope I don't disappoint. 🙂

Meet Dan and Charlotte

So I've been a bit lax on the creative writing front for a while. I thought I'd rectify that with an experimental fiction project I've had in mind for some time.

I present to you Daniel Harris and Charlotte Bristow, two twentysomethings who live in the glamorous city of Southampton. Daniel and Charlotte have the same birthday (29th August) and both studied English at the University of Southampton. In fact, they sat next to each other on a number of occasions. But they don't know each other. They don't even know the other one exists. Not yet, anyway.

They don't have a lot in common. Dan is depressed, lonely and increasingly turning to drink. Charlotte is happy, hopeful and uses the word "party" as a verb. However, both of them enjoyed their study of English and are pedantic to a fault, and they do have a few interests in common. Both of them are struggling to work out what to do with their lives now university is over, and are temping to pay the rent.

This project, which I haven't given a name to yet (working title "Dan and Charlie") is an exercise in improvisatory blogging. I will be playing the role of both Dan and Charlie and improvising their fictional lives, perhaps with a little fact interspersed here and there for local colour. After all, I too live in Southampton and studied English (along with Music) at the University of Southampton, so after all we have a bit in common… conveniently. It will be an interesting exercise in "method acting" (for want of a better description) for me, and an exercise in self-discovery for Dan and Charlie, who are both new to blogging.

If anyone actually reads the blogs, thinks they're real people (so no-one who knows me directly, then) and feels the need to comment or interact with Dan and Charlie (who have their own email addresses and eventually will find their way to at least Twitter and possibly other social networking sites if I can be bothered to "network" that much on behalf of both of them), that may well inspire their independent storylines to develop in particular directions. I have a few "events" in mind for the pair of them and, of course, they will come across each other at some point. What happens from there remains to be seen.

I intend to blog on behalf of the pair of them fairly often. It'll be an interesting exercise in creative characterisation and allow me to keep myself in practice of writing stream-of-consciousness first-person narrative if nothing else – maybe it won't go anywhere, maybe it'll develop in interesting and unexpected directions. Who knows? We shall see.

One rule for those of you reading this: don't let on, at least not on their sites. As far as readers of their sites are concerned, Dan and Charlie are real people, and it'd be cool to have them interacting with strangers and see how that develops their own personal stories. Comments will be moderated and anything "out of character" won't be approved by either Dan or Charlie.

Well, this will either be an interesting exercise or I'll end up with Multiple Personality Disorder. We'll see. I hope you enjoy the mundanity of their everyday lives.

TWANG! Waggle! Kick! Punch! It's all in the mind!

Those of you following me on Twitter may be familiar with my Jedi Health Kick blog. Perhaps you're reading it already, in which case you'll know I recently picked up a copy of EA Sports Active in my latest attempt to hammer and chisel my woeful body into a shape vaguely resembling human. It's good stuff, and for anyone doubting the value of Wii Fit as an exercise programme, you can rest assured that EA Sports Active gives you much more of a battering than Wii Fit ever did thanks to the fact it actually takes you through set programmes (although, of course, you can create your own also) rather than leaving you to your own devices and relying on your own self-discipline which – let's face it – your lack of is probably the reason you came to titles like Wii Fit in the first place!

The thing I like about it is how "videogamey" it makes the whole experience. Being a supergeek as I am, I like anything that rewards achievement in a noticeable way. I'm a sucker for slidey bars, percentage markers and trophies. Ironic, really, that I never got into sports, since sports are also filled with slidey bars, percentage markers and trophies. Anyway, the fact is that EASA is full of these things. You get trophies not only for successfully completing workouts, but for smaller things like doing a certain number of laps around the virtual track across all your workouts, doing a certain number of squats, burning a certain number of calories and the like. These are all goals that you would probably set yourself if you were one of those people who are "into fitness" and can motivate themselves, but for the gamers (or the lazy) amongst us, it helps to have something to remind us that even smaller achievements are worth celebrating.

Anyway, to cut to the tenuous link: there's been a lot of discussion surrounding motion control and full-body control recently, particularly after E3. Some seem to think that it's "the way that games are going", with the idea of us standing up to play games and running the risk of hurricane-kicking our TV a very real possibility. Others are very much a fan of the traditional controller, believing that it is something fundamentally "gamey". I'm inclined to fall into this latter camp, but the motion control thing has some obvious health benefits which are clearly demonstrated by titles like EASA.

The question is, of course, do you want something that is primarily an entertainment device to provide health benefits all the time? Look at other media. TV and books offer health benefits sometimes – you can watch a yoga DVD or read a lifestyle book – but for however many of these there are, there are an equal if not greater number of "junk" items to enjoy – pure, unadulterated enjoyment with no pretense of "doing it for your own good". In this sense, while motion controls are cool and groovy, I'd like to hope that the controller isn't dead just yet.

A key part of the experience is tactile feedback. While motion controls allow you to feel your own body moving, when it comes to actually touching or hitting something, you don't feel anything. This is also a problem with touchscreen controls – a joypad on a touchscreen will never match a real joypad until a technology is developed where you can "feel" it. I also question how some genres would work with motion controls – take an FPS, for example. How do you look up? If you REALLY look up, then you can't see the TV any more, so unless Halo Natal comes with some sort of 360-degree "vision ball" that you have to stand inside to play (which would be awesome, incidentally) then you're resorting to flailing your arms around in some arbitrary gesture or pointing something at the top of the screen.

I think there's work to do – and I just hope that people aren't going to embrace these new technologies too completely. I very much like them and think they're going to be a lot of interesting fun to play with – plus I think all of them provide plenty of scope for further titles like EASA and Wii Fit to improve gamer lifestyle, which can only be a good thing – but let's hope the controller isn't dead just yet, hmm?

Avatar Integration and Feeling the Burn

In my last post, I discussed the virtual world of Second Life. This is something that, as you probably noticed, is of particular interest to me – and I'm not the only one. Jenn Frank posted entries about the issue of avatars and personal identity at some length here and here – two articles on which I also commented at some length – and this led onto an interesting discussion of whether avatars were a reflection of your real-life personality or a fantastical creation from the depths of your own mind.

There are no particular conclusions to draw on this issue, as everyone's different. Just because someone enjoys being tied up and sodomized in Second Life (not me, I might add) doesn't necessarily mean that they will in real life. Just because a guy plays a woman (also not me, though I have been known on more than one occasion to play female characters in games), it doesn't mean that they want a sex change. An avatar doesn't have to look anything like the real-life human behind the controls, but sometimes it does.

My avatar, until recently, looked like me, sort of, a bit. A slightly-idealised version of me, if you will, if I were slightly cooler, less fat and able to pull off black leather jackets and red hair. This all changed the other night, however, when a friend that I had previously only had passing contact with on photo exchange site Flickr decided that tonight would be the night we would meet in-world. Said friend is an active Second Life photographer, fond of, as I am, grabbing groups of good-looking avatars, snapping some pictures of them and then Photoshopping the hell out of them in order to produce some pretty pics. I have something of a liking for this process myself, so here's a picture of aforementioned friend following aforementioned Photoshop mangling:

Morgana(Incidentally, if nothing else, working on SL pics is a fantastic way to get to grips with Photoshop – I've learned far more about graphic design and image manipulation through playing with SL pics than by working on actual photos.)

But anyway: the point. Part of SL's appeal is that you can change your appearance, shape and even gender on a whim. I hadn't done this until now, as I felt something of a personal attachment to my avatar, as you tend to do anything that you "own" and "use" for a long time, or characters in a lengthy RPG *cough*Persona*cough*. Besides, I felt that my avatar was an expression of me – me putting myself "out there" as me. So it was with some trepidation that when Morgana and her friend asked me if they could try out a new skin and shape on me I accepted – I was stepping out of my comfort zone.

The new shape and skin were very different from what I had played before. I felt uncomfortable. It wasn't me. But then the compliments started rolling in. Suddenly I was hot. As shallow as it sounds, a simple change in appearance – an easy matter in SL – was enough to bring these compliments and by extension, give me a huge amount of confidence. Over the subsequent few days, I have grown accustomed to my new avatar – so much so that I feel I am now unlikely to return to my old one, at least for now.

But something else happened in me, too. I looked at my new, buff, muscular self with cool hair staring back at me from the screen and I thought… "I wish I could be like that." The next day I signed up to our local gym and swimming pool complex, and I'm now following a regular exercise programme. It's funny the things that affect you personally and give you inspiration – I never thought the whole avatar thing would work in reverse, with it giving me a desire to do something positive about my real life appearance. And while it's unlikely I'm ever going to look quite like my improbably-shouldered alter-ego, it was very much the "trigger" to set me off on this process. It's an interesting inverse of the usual "avatar reflecting aspects of reality" thing that I hadn't thought of previously.

I discussed this with some friends recently, and they each admitted that they had had similarly peculiar experiences where something "uninspirational" had, ironically, provided them with the inspiration to make a change in their lives. Each of these things carried a certain degree of personal shame to them, too, so I won't embarrass those friends by sharing them with you now. Suffice it to say that I was faintly embarrassed to say that it was SL that inspired me to kick off this workout programme, until I realised that it really doesn't matter what it is that inspires you, so long as it inspires you. And this is why I'm sharing this story with you now.

The BattleIf you're the slightest bit curious about following said workout programme and my feelings towards it, you can follow my progress on Tumblr here.

On Virtual Worlds

I haven't really blogged about this much on this particular site, but I figured it's time to sit down and talk about it as it's something that I've found consistently interesting for quite a few years now.

The subject is virtual worlds – online spaces where tens, hundreds, thousands of people can log in and join a virtual community for one reason or another… it may be purely to socialise, it may be to battle monsters, it may be to have fun, it may even be to have sex. And I'm not talking about community or social networking websites here, as those are a different beast entirely. No, I'm talking about actual virtual worlds, where you can wander around as an avatar, explore the world, meet other people and interact with them in any of the ways described above.

There's literally hundreds of virtual worlds available for people to use nowadays, of many types – some are more "gamey", others are more "social", others still are focused on the less salubrious side of online interactions. Today I want to focus particularly on the virtual world of Second Life and its appeal to me, despite its many, many flaws.

I remember first hearing about Second Life while I was big into The Sims. My whole flat at university became obsessed with The Sims shortly after I built our first house, made virtual representations of all six of us in the flat, then realised that we didn't have enough money to buy beds to begin with, so the whole "family" slept in recliners. Over the years – yes, I was that guy – I bought most of the expansions and later moved on to The Sims 2.

I was, like many other fans of the series, extremely excited at the prospect of The Sims Online, offering the opportunity to have the same kind of fun, but with other people involved. It never made it over here to the UK – at least, not in any prominent way – so I never got the opportunity to try it. I forget exactly how I came across Second Life as a result of this, but it was something I stumbled across without hearing anything about it beforehand, and I thought that the concept sounded rather like The Sims Online, with players being able to design their own virtual person and "live" in a virtual world. As it happens, it has very little to do with The Sims Online, but I wasn't to know that at the time.

For the uninitiated, Second Life is an ambitious virtual world project by Linden Lab, offering "players" (and I use the term loosely, as it's really not a "game" as such… unless you choose to make it as such, which we'll discuss later) the opportunity to enter a world that is almost entirely user-generated. Buildings, textures, landmasses, interface features, animations, body parts, clothing – everything is created by the residents of the virtual world, and this is the thing that initially fascinated me. I couldn't comprehend the idea of being able to log into something where the content was so fluid, where there wasn't a static virtual world that was always the same every time you logged in, with monsters in the same place, prime "camping spots" and so on. So I signed up and signed in, not really knowing what to expect.

at-the-gateSecond Life is a peculiar experience the first time you log in, especially if you're more used to aforementioned online games with static content, such as World of Warcraft. You quickly become used to the concept of "rezzing", which is the process whereby you enter a new location and you can see things downloading and appearing around you. This is disconcerting the first time it happens (and more than a little irritating if you find yourself stuck against a wall which hasn't appeared yet) but, like many things in the world, you become used to it the more it happens. Similarly, you become used to the fact that other residents' avatars also go through this rezzing process in front of you, so it's entirely possible that someone could appear in front of you with no hair and no face until the textures and shapes have downloaded. Rezzing accidents are the subject of many a good laugh amongst SL residents, but they are accepted as part and parcel of life in the virtual world. People more used to traditional MMOs will likely find it a complete turn-off though – at least until they accustom themselves to it.

Upon arrival in SL, the question on many residents' lips is "what on earth am I supposed to be doing?" And the answer is not simple. Explore, interact, build things, take photographs, join groups, play games, look at art, shop, fuck, roleplay, pretend to be a vampire… the list goes on for a mile, and all of these interactions are built using the basic engine of the Linden Lab-developed software, with extensions built, designed and scripted by residents of the world, just like everything else. People make in-world money either by paying out of their own pocket to buy "currency" – or by working a job, just like real life (albeit with MUCH better hours). It's always interesting to hear how seriously people take their SL jobs, whether they're a DJ in a club streaming their music through something like ShoutCast, a live musician, a virtual performer, a dancer, a greeter, a builder, an estate agent, a facility manger, a prostitute, a Game Master for roleplaying areas – again, the list of things goes on, and people have the opportunity to completely subsidise their virtual existence through virtual hard graft if they so desire.

Another thing that is almost immediately noticeable about SL is the sheer diversity of the avatars present. And we're not talking a set choice of races here, with arbitrary "body size" sliders. We're talking complete customisation. We're talking this situation here:

snapshot_111This wasn't anything particularly special happening – it was a discussion group where we sat down and had a civilised chat about a set topic. Like a real-world discussion group in fact.

And that's the thing with Second Life. It has this immensely odd (yet perfectly natural-feeling once you've been there a while) ability to combine the mundane and the absurd. Everyone is distinctive in Second Life – because you're not limited to hard-coded appearance options, you can be whoever you want to be. You don't even have to be human. I picked up an awesome Pac-Man avatar the other day that allows you to spawn dots and ghosts and turn any place you go into a game of 3D Pac-Man.

In fact, the question of not being human is one of the more interesting sides to Second Life that I haven't explored yet. It also happens to be the side that there's a lot of sordid assumptions about, particularly around the "furry" avatars. Yes, there are people who choose to represent themselves as furry animals and then have simulated sex whilst masturbating furiously at the sight of their interlocked pixels. But equally there are people who choose to represent themselves as furry animals just because they like them. On one memorable occasion I was spending some time at a hangout with my earliest friends in SL (who are still good personal friends to this day, I might add) and I was introduced to an immensely clever man from a university who was working on lots of exciting things to do with AI. My friend Lyndy, who introduced me, assumed that because I "knew about computers" I'd be able to chat to this guy no problem. However, he was explaining concepts that were way over my head… but they were interesting to hear. The really peculiar thing, though, was that he was dressed as a fox. Not a foxy lady, no, an actual fox. In a waistcoat. If anyone remembers a really old DOS point-and-click adventure called Inherit the Earth… the main character from that? Fox-in-a-waistcoat called Rif? That's about it.

Why do I remember that? I never even played it.

Second Life is flawed in many ways. I've talked about this many a time with Jennatar, and she suggested the notion that virtual worlds are a much younger technology than the Internet. Currently with virtual worlds, she says, we're at a similar sort of stage to the Internet was in in the early 90s in that there's a lot of stuff out there to explore, but navigation, user interfaces, efficiency and practicality haven't quite reached the level of stability you'd need to be completely "mainstream". This means that titles like Second Life are, at least for now, going to be "niche" interests. However, interestingly, the "niche" for Second Life perhaps isn't what you'd expect – an oft-quoted "statistic" is that of the many residents of the world, a significant majority of them are female and over 30. This is certainly true amongst my circle of online friends – I think there's one guy and about thirty gals on my friends list. This is also backed up by the fact that the "retail" sector in the world is very much female-dominated, with vast business empires and shopping malls devoted to female clothing, hair, animations and the like, with male products often relegated to the virtual equivalent of a dusty old cellar. One may argue that this may lead to a lot of males representing them as females, and of course this goes on – given the opportunity to live out a fantasy life, I'm sure there's plenty of men out there who wonder what it would be like to be a woman – and a hot one at that (no-one is ugly in SL unless you make a specific effort to do so!) – and give it a try.

There's a kind of implicit understanding amongst residents though – don't ask, don't tell. If someone doesn't want their "first life" brought into it, then you don't ask. If it's a female on the screen, then as far as you're concerned, it's a female you're dealing with. I actually don't have a problem with this. Perhaps it's because I'm not spending my time going around having sex with these people, but it certainly doesn't bother me – if they choose to represent themselves in that way, for whatever reason that might be, then that's their business.

Despite its many flaws and its perceived "niche" interest, I have a lot of time for Second Life. It's an experience that is very much made by the people you interact with. Without people to meet, talk to and interact with you're relying on stumbling across interesting content solo – and while there is plenty of interesting stuff to do by yourself, it's always better to share with other people. Much like real life, in fact.

quiet-thunder

I'll certainly be very interested to see how virtual worlds develop over the years. Will Second Life remain in its pioneering position of almost entirely user-generated content? Will it be overtaken by something else? Who knows. I do know that I have made some genuinely close friends in its strange world, many of whom I am unlikely to ever meet face-to-face. And I'm fine with that. By having their "virtual" face in front of me on the screen – even if it's nothing like their real-life face – I still feel like I "know" them better than people I interact with on the Internet in less direct ways. Perhaps "know" is the wrong word – it's difficult to describe, but knowing someone's avatar feels a lot more "physical" (for want of a better word) somehow than a username on a page of text.

It's not an experience for everyone by any means. It would bore the pants off someone expecting to play an exciting game, because it's not a game. But as a means for virtual social interaction, it's an interesting experiment… one that still has a long way to go, but also has an incredible amount of potential.

I blog about my experiences in the world in more detail here. I post my photos from the world here. Feel free to check them out if you're the slightest bit interested.

Communication, mmm-mm-mmmm

Back in primary school, we used to have to sing songs in Assembly every morning. Then on Thursday mornings, we'd have "Hymn Practice" instead of Assembly, which in most cases was simply an Assembly by a different name. And then there was the one afternoon a week where the music teacher (who was also my piano teacher at the time) would come into the school and make us sing even more, using material from the BBC's Singing Together radio programme and companion songbooks.

One of the awful songs that has inexplicably stuck in my head ever since those dark, song-filled times ran thus:

Communication, mmm-mm-mmm,
Communication, mmm-mm-mmm,
Way back long ago men sent messages
Beating out rhythms on drums and bones

I remember the rest of the tune, but not the words. It was one of those songs that parents like to describe as "funky" when in fact, due to the fact it's performed by tone-deaf primary school students accompanied by a miserable pianist on an out-of-tune piano, is anything but.

This is a roundabout way of introducing the topic I feel like talking about today which is, oddly enough, communication (mmm-mm-mmm). I apologise, but if you're reading this post, you've probably indulged my flights into the bizarre in the past.

There's been a lot of attention on sites such as Twitter recently, and particularly, it seems, in the last month or so. Ever since Stephen Fry happened to mention it on the Jonathan Ross show here in the UK, people in my group of "real-life" friends have been signing up to it like crazy. This is a big thing, because many Internet "fads" often pass by the UK, the general (i.e. non-geek) population here being afflicted by a sort of general malaise and apathy that causes them to denounce anything where you have to do something that could be remotely considered as "work" (i.e. something where you have to use your brain or, God forbid, write something) to be a Bad Thing.

To give you an idea of how this has gone, let me paint you a little picture. I have been using Twitter for some time now as a means of communicating with my friends in the Squadron of Shame, who are mostly based in the US and Canada. It's been great for that, but it's also been great as a means of "stress relief" – a place to post those thoughts you don't really want to say out loud but you kind of want people to "hear", if you catch my meaning. I often refer to it as a means of externalising your own inner monologue, and for many people it is. Of course, blogs also carry that function for many people, but the immediacy of Twitter, coupled with the fact you are limited in how much you can say, makes it an attractive option for "microblogging", its originally intended purpose.

Now, as I say, I've been using it for some time both as a means of communicating with other people and venting my own frustrations, of which there are many, as you've probably seen. My friends here in the UK often wondered why on earth I was bothering with such a simple website when places like Facebook offered far more in the way of options, applications and other fluff – particularly when Facebook offers its own system for microblogging through its status update system. But the fact is, the simplicity of Twitter is the attractive thing about it. Facebook is full of fluff, and has been growing more fluff as time goes on, as have other sites like it. Now, much more than simply being able to post messages to that hot girl you fancy at college, or trying to avoid exes, Facebook markets itself as a "platform" for the interminable flow of applications that clutter up everyone's profiles and get in the way of the original purpose – communicating.

Twitter does no such thing. Twitter gives you a box to type in what you're doing, and a list of other people's answers to the same query. Nothing more. And as a result, the communication involved is much better. If you want to ask someone something, you ask them. There's no wading through their Tetris high scores, no comparing people and choosing who is "the most punctual" (thanks for voting for me on that one, you obviously don't know me THAT well) and no looking at daily LOLcats. Simple and clear.

There's a time and a place for these different types of communication, of course, but it was just interesting to me that it took a celebrity endorsement for people in this country to pay attention to something as simple as Twitter, while the glitz and flash of Facebook, MySpace and Bebo sweep through the lands like a plague.

With this in mind, over the last few months I've been exploring different alternatives for communicating on the web. With the ubiquity of the Internet these days, you're never very far from some means of talking to another person – be that in real-time via instant messaging services or in a more "when you feel like it" manner via services like Twitter, Facebook and message boards. There's an interesting variety of different approaches.

First, of course, is the humble blog. You're reading this, and presumably you've got this far otherwise you wouldn't know I'd said "presumably you've got this far". Why are you reading this? It could be one of several reasons. It could be because you want to get to know me better, it could be because you're nosey, it could be because you're interested in the things I talk about (though I defy anyone to pin a single "topic" on this blog) or it could simply because you like the way I write. How did you find me? Chances are, in my experience, that you found this place either because I told you, or because you clicked on a link in one of my other friends' sites. How you got here doesn't matter. If you're reading this, you're effectively allowing me to talk at you for several minutes before I pause, look around the room at the people who have been listening intently (and ignoring the people who wandered off to look at porn several paragraphs ago) and invite questions and comments in the… um… comments. Blogs can be good starting points for discussions, but they're inherently one-sided – the blog's writer has most of the power, and commenters have a more "subservient" role, if anything. That's not a bad reflection on any of you thinking about commenting, before you say anything – it's simply the way the medium works.

I find a blog to be a great way of getting complicated thoughts or opinions out of my head in a way I (and hopefully other people) can understand – when expressing myself verbally rather than through text, I often find that social anxiety takes over and I get tongue-tied. Here, though, I can consider what I say before I say it, and then invite questions or opinions after the fact.

Next up, I've been exploring Tumblr. Tumblr is a strange one, somewhere halfway between Twitter and a blog in its execution. Different people use Tumblr for different things. For the self-confessed lazy blogger, it makes a solid, easy-to-use foundation for blogging in the manner I discussed above. For others, such as myself, it becomes a sort of digital scrapbook, a receptacle for all the random noise floating around your head or pictures of cats that you see on the Internet that you don't want to clog up your Twitter stream with constantly.

For others still, it becomes a means of communication, though in a completely different manner to something like Twitter. Tumblr's communication centres around the idea of "reblogging" – taking something that someone else posted, posting it on your own page and adding your own take on it. This is something that tends not to happen with blogs like this one – either because they're too content-rich, too long or simply out of respect for the person who wrote it in the first place. After all, if you want to comment, there's a comments box right at the bottom. Not so on Tumblr, however – because posts tend to be short and snappy – a quote, an excerpt from conversation, a photo – it's easier to reblog them, comment on them and thereby expose them to more and more people. In that sense, Tumblr is very much a viral marketer's dream. Post something cool once and if someone reblogs it, then someone else reblogs it, then someone else… each time it gets more and more views and is accessible to a wider and wider audience.

Smokey Darth

Take this awesome picture of Darth Vader, originally from the Wired blog, apparently. By the time I came across it, fairly randomly, I might add, it had already been through about ten people. Currently, there are 134 "notes" on the image, which means it's either been tagged as "liked" or "reblogged" by 134 people. Similarly, take the Microsoft Songsmith stuff. There's absolutely no denying that Songsmith is a work of great evil, but I bet you know what I'm talking about without me having to post a link. Viral marketing at work. Sort of.

Then there's more "active" means of communication. I have had a long-time fascination with virtual world Second Life, it still representing a fairly unique branching-off from the typical massively-multiplayer scenario in that there are no goals, no scores, no experience points, no set content – pretty much everything – buildings, objects, scripting that makes objects work, bits of interface, even avatar clothing, hair and body parts – is created by the "players". This is a spectacular achievement, when you think about it, and whatever you may feel about Second Life and the people who enjoy it, there's absolutely no denying that it's an impressive means of communication and expression. It is very much its own world with its own rules and conventions, and it's an interesting place to spend some time, even if you don't plan on staying. Just to confuse matters, I started a Tumblelog about my Second Life experiences here, and microblog about it on yet another site called Plurk, which feeds to a Twitter feed, which… you get the idea.

There are a million and one other sites I could talk about on this note but I feel I have carried on for far too long already. The point of this post is simply to celebrate the possibilities for communication that the Internet offers. It's easy to forget – or at least take for granted – the fact that simply by sitting down in front of our computer, we can easily talk to and interact with people from all over the world. Let's never forget how awesome that is.

Listen To Whatever The Hell You Want

I'm many things, but one thing I've never been is cool. There are many reasons for this – crap hair, being overweight, dandruff, a tendency to blush furiously when talking to people, a voice I hate listening to (which, inexplicably, seems to have gained a cult following thanks to the SquadCast) and, of course, relentless self-deprecation.

This lack of coolness was particularly apparent during my teenage years. These days I like to think I have my own identity – nerd chic or whatever stupid post-modern label you want to apply to it – and I'm quite happy with this. During adolescence, though, it's easy to be jealous of "the cool kids" and for many nerds such as myself, the way to get in on some of that action was to get into the same music that they liked. At least then you'd have something to talk about, and you'd feel justified sitting in on them in the Music department at lunchtime, trying their best not to crucify their favourite song and, inevitably, failing.

I didn't quite manage this perfectly, however. Kids were into Blur and Oasis when I was at school, so the first album I ever bought for myself was Oasis' Definitely Maybe. Fine. A good choice. Unfortunately, I chose the day before (What's The Story) Morning Glory? came out to purchase it, so was thus branded an idiot.

Over time, I got a little better, picking up some other albums that other people considered to be "classics" for various reasons, and more than a few stinkers as well – all of which I have, and intend to hold onto with no shame as a reminder of my past. I never really strayed that far out of the cultural comfort zone of local commercial radio and what I read in magazines, though.

As time went on, I got older and I apparently at some point signed that non-negotiable contract that means once you're over the age of 25 you must immediately start hating all contemporary popular music. (To be fair, contemporary popular music is shit.) As such, I kind of stopped paying that much attention to a lot of music for a while, instead sticking to things that I'd liked for years, or more "niche" interests such as countless remixes, reorchestrations and even a spectacular metal reinterpretation of the Final Fantasy soundtracks. During my training as a teacher, my buddy Owen introduced me to 80s and early 90s metal, which I enjoyed greatly but didn't explore in any depth. In the meantime, the charts slowly filled up with 50 Cent and crap like the track in the link posted above, and television began search after search for "the next big star", with Popstars, Pop Idol, The X-Factor, Britain's Got Talent and all manner of other "talent" shows which proved again and again that the mainstream popular music industry at large wasn't interested in talent, just someone who "looked right" and was "marketable".

Fast forward a few years – to now, in fact. I picked up Guitar Hero World Tour and Rock Band 2 the other week, and between them those two games have reignited an interest in exploring music. Not middle-of-the-road chart music because that's still shit. (I know I posted that already. But it is shit.) No, I'm talking music where the artists actually play their instruments and in many cases compose their own songs too.

It may sound trite to quote Guitar Hero and Rock Band as influences on exploring music, but it's true in my case. Speaking as an actual musician (albeit not a guitarist, vocalist or particularly gifted singer), I can say that both games encourage analytical listening of the music you're playing, even if the note charts for you to play on your plastic instruments are sometimes a little questionable (but that's a discussion for another day). As such, it quickly becomes apparent which ones are the genuinely-well composed tracks and which ones are masking their compositional deficiencies behind lots of noise. For the most part, there's a clear divide between "classic rock" of the 70s and 80s and more recent tracks, with many earlier tracks displaying much more in the way of virtuosity (and stamina), particularly on the part of the guitarists and drummers – but there are some notable exceptions, two of which I thought I'd mention particularly, as the individual tracks in Rock Band actually convinced me to explore these artists further and purchase more of their music.

First up is Coheed and Cambria, which I know RocGaude is a fan of. Coheed and Cambria are prog-rock taken to the extreme, with spectacularly lengthy album titles (the one I purchased is called Good Apollo I'm Burning Star IV Volume One: From Fear Through The Eyes Of Madness) and even a companion series of graphic novels to flesh out the story of the characters in the songs. But there's something about the songs, particularly Welcome Home, the track from Rock Band, that "got" me. Now that I've mentioned this, Coheed and Cambria fans amongst my circle of friends have started coming out of the closet too. I'd never heard of them prior to a couple of weeks ago – now it seems that appreciation for their work is more widespread than I thought.

Next up is Dream Theater, their track Panic Attack representing one of the most difficult tracks in Rock Band 2, thanks to some tricky riffs and the fact that it jumps around from 5/4 to triplet rhythms at irregular intervals, meaning that everyone in the band has to keep on their toes. This piece was so unashamedly dramatic that it immediately appealed to me, with the concept of the piece also holding a degree of personal resonance for me. As a result, I decided to check out the album it was from, Octavarium. I wasn't disappointed – from the opening track through a hugely diverse range of styles paying homage to U2 and Muse among other things, and finishing with a twenty-minute long finale, I really enjoyed the album. It's the first album I actually decided to sit and listen to – as in, headphones on, lights off, concentrate on the music and nothing else – for a very long time. Not working with music on, not blogging, not browsing the Internet, not having the music on in the background – just focusing on the music exclusively. And I had a great experience with the album.

My point? Yes, there is one, however flimsy it might be. I have no idea if it's cool to like Coheed and Cambria, or Dream Theater, but I am happy to stand up and be counted as someone who likes them both. I'm sure I will discover more great new music as time goes on, from Rock Band, from the live gigs I've been to recently and via services like last.fm.

In short, anywhere but from BBC Radio 1.

And that song is shit.

Haunted Stereo Live at the Hobbit

So here we are again. After a somewhat touch-and-go start to the day after being molested by numerous pints of toilet cleaner masquerading as Lord of the Rings characters, I find myself here considering what it was I saw last night at the Hobbit.

Things began well when I managed to sneak in and grab a peek at the performers' soundchecks earlier in the evening. When I saw that an electric ukulele was involved, I knew that this was going to be anything but traditional. However, as these things tend to go, it would be an hour or two between soundchecks starting and the actual performances beginning, so I took the opportunity to use every piece of mobile Web 2.0 technology at my disposal to write last night's blog post, tweet like crazy, post pictures of The Hobbit's pleasantly literate toilet graffiti to Tumblr and generally keep things rolling until the bands took the stage later. I also had the opportunity to people-watch a little, with The Hobbit's diverse clientele once again failing to disappoint. From the old drunk babbling about chicken to the selection of surly-looking goths playing pool, The Hobbit is a fine place to witness most subcultures coming together in relative harmony for once. The only group not really represented was the humble chav, which I have absolutely no objection to. I'd much rather they'd all be off their faces on cheap lager at Jesters down the road than spoiling everyone else's night.

But I digress. There were performances to watch, and it turned out to be a very entertaining, very pleasant evening.

I'm not going to talk much about the support acts here, but I did want to mention the first one. This was a solo female singer named Plat du Jour. She gave a good start to the evening's entertainment with her songs. Although her arrangements were necessarily simple, given that it was just her and her guitar, her songs were pleasant to listen to, covered a variety of different moods – all too many performers stick too much to one style and one style alone – and she had a wonderfully friendly, down-to-earth manner with the audience. She also had a great voice, with shades of Portishead's Beth Gibbons at times. I'll be interested to see where things go with her performances, as she certainly has a lot of potential, judging by her performance.

The main event of the evening, however, was Haunted Stereo, made up of members Andy, Anja, Dave, Joanna, Kenta and Lewis. They describe themselves on their MySpace page as "melodramatic popular song/folk/indie", which is immediately intriguing. The band's lineup changes from song to song, with some songs focusing on traditional guitar and drum sounds, with others bringing the folk angle to the fore with violin and accordion taking centre stage, others still involving banjo, the aforementioned electric ukulele and even a glockenspiel at one point. They're nothing if not diverse.

But what of the music? Well, their own description, as it turns out, is pretty apt. There's a definite folky edge to many of the songs thanks to the instrumentation involved and the patterns used in the backings. The melodrama comes mostly from the vocal lines which are simple, subtle and sometimes mournful, rising over the top of the busy backing. The combination of instruments means that although at times the band's pieces are filled with activity, with violin lines, accordion harmonies, banjo plucking, piano lines, drums and guitar parts all competing for attention, they have a pleasantly clean sound which, should you be that guy who sits there listening analytically until he learns how to hum the most obscure harmony part to a song, will make you very happy.

I was impressed with Haunted Stereo. I have a feeling they're another band that maybe won't be to everyone's taste due to their out-of-the ordinary stylings and instrumentation, but there's certainly a lot to like. The performers all obviously have great technical ability and versatility, and the songs are all extremely listenable, with more than a touch of Belle and Sebastian to one or two of them. They offer an interesting twist on the "folk rock" genre, artists of which The Hobbit seems to attract like flies (but, err, in a good way) and a sound that, even if it's not your thing, is nothing if not memorable.

Live music is absolutely not dead. Musicians with genuine creativity, too, are still alive and kicking, and this gig proved that. However, it's only by stepping outside the comfort zone of the national and commercial radio stations, and the pure banality of the popular music charts, that you find this creativity. What I've certainly opened my eyes to over these last couple of visits to The Hobbit is that there's a lot of very talented musicians out there who have no desire whatsoever to appear on The X-Factor in order to be catapulted to stardom and a career of mediocre, predictable songs. This is a good thing, as my thoughts on commercial crap are well-known and well-documented. Haunted Stereo are anything but commercial, but they have carved out a comfortable niche all of their own and I wish them every success in building their fanbase and being stars of the melodramatic popular song/folk/indie world.

Good music should speak for itself. And it does. I've enjoyed some good music recently. You should switch off your radio and join me.