Penny Arcade Live at the Hobbit

Photography in this post courtesy of Laura Bishop. If you're reading on Facebook and you can't see said pictures, click here to see the full article.

So I went out the other night. This is a pretty rare occurrence and worthy of discussion in and of itself but I'm not here to do that. Instead I'm going to be focusing on the gig I went to see – Penny Arcade, live at the Hobbit pub, Southampton, UK. I'm going to say now to all the gamers reading that this post has nothing whatsoever to do with Gabe and Tycho and the nomenclature of the band is a complete coincidence, apparently. Who am I to argue?

Live gigs here in Southampton are often a case of a million people crowding into a tiny pub that can seat about three old men and a dog around the fire, listening to ear-shatteringly loud music whilst downing drinks that look like they've been piped directly from the local toxic waste dump to the spigots, served frantically by an underpaid and overworked staff clearly insufficient in numbers to cope with the number of rabid, binge-drinking fans.

The Hobbit is, of course, no exception to this rule, with crowds regularly squeezing into its little downstairs bar (a little larger than the average living room) to listen to some tunes and destroy their brain-cells with the vibrant primary colours of the Lord of the Rings-themed cocktails. Actually, "themed" might be pushing things a bit far, as I don't remember Gollum having a thing for Bols Blue, though many is the time that consumption of too many Gandalfs has led to a fall into darkness, albeit not accompanied by a big flamey demon thing. (Balrog. I know. Be quiet.) Despite all this, however, the Hobbit remains a popular nightspot with a lot of local acts of a variety of styles from the Southampton area performing there on a regular basis. Plus sometimes there's a guy who comes around and sells fish. Really.

Penny Arcade, consisting of Alex Burton on guitar, Matt Rampton on vocals/bass and Tom Uplifter on drums, were performing as part of a complete evening's set including other local performers Andy from Haunted Stereo, and Long Shore Drift. In total, they graced us with six songs, including Straight Through, I'm Not Sleeping, Are We Talking, Jaws of the Enemy, Katie and a work-in-progress song called "Rocket Ship" performed solo by vocalist Matt. Are We Talking and I'm Not Sleeping can both be heard on their MySpace page, if you're reading this and are curious. You know you are.

Penny Arcade's sound is a pleasingly smooth guitar-bass-drum combo which, when coupled with the distinctively melancholy sound of Matt's vocals, is very listenable. The band keeps a deliberately lo-fi sound, with minimal guitar effects being used and repetitive, hypnotic guitar/bass riffs and beats making up the majority of the songs' backings. Performing with a more "clean" sound and using minimal effects to hide behind can be a challenge for many bands as it often highlights the shortcomings of their own technical abilities, but Penny Arcade manage to perform very tightly together as an ensemble. Their songs have an intimate, personal feel to them, with Matt's vocal performance style of eyes closed, mouth to the microphone and little in the way of body movement draws the audience in and encourages them to focus on what it is he is singing about throughout. This is a great style to perform in a venue as intimate/cramped (delete as applicable) as The Hobbit – arguably made rather more poignant by consuming just one too many Gandalfs to get one to that "drunken melancholia" stage.

Alex Burton on guitar (photo by Laura Bishop)

Penny Arcade's style undoubtedly isn't for everyone. They're low on flashy glitz and overt showmanship, both in their unassuming physical performance styles and the sound of their music in general, but they're all the better for it – to me, at least. All three performers look deep in concentration during their performance, which is in keeping with the "personal" feel to the songs, and the whole gig felt like the audience were being let in on some kind of secret. This is the kind of thing that I have a lot of time for, and it's this kind of feel that keeps people coming to the Hobbit for gigs – however sticky the floor gets, however terrible those vibrantly-coloured cocktails may make you feel the next day, however many sweaty bodies you may be squeezing yourself up against (and not in a good way… usually) – it's the intimacy of the venue and, by extension, the intimacy of the performances there that works so well. Penny Arcade fit right in, and I hope to see more of them in the future.

Matt Rampton on vocals and bass (photo by Laura Bishop)

As for the other bands? Well, to be honest, I couldn't comment. Gandalf number three made me fall into darkness.

Photo credit: © Laura Bishop, 2009.

'Tis the season to be miserable

So what's the deal with winter anyway?

Trite opening I know but it bears some discussion. Exactly what is it about those winter months that makes an already-curmudgeonly old git like myself into a regular Sad Sack? I refuse to believe there's not an answer beyond "it's cold" because I'm not the only one it happens to.

Case study number one: my very good friend, who we'll just call "E" in case she minds being used as a case study, cited the example to me that every bad breakup she's ever had took place in the month of December, almost without fail. Is this a symptom of the winter blues or just a coincidence? Whatever it is, it's made her just as distrustful of the month of Our Lord's birth than I am.

Who knows. All I know is that it's dark in the morning when I go to work, often dark in the evening when I return. The general public are in that irritatingly frenzied state of "panic buying" – because some people still aren't aware that most shops are shut on Christmas Day after all – and all those little annoyances about the general public that you already notice more than the average man in the street when you work in retail suddenly become ten to fifteen times worse. (I have no scientific basis for quoting that figure, I just thought I'd channel the arseholes who come up with make-up "fake science" adverts for a moment – they're gone now, don't worry.)

Last year I had the most miserable Christmas of my life. My wife-to-be had departed for Bolton to spend Christmas with her family (duty calls and all that) and I was scheduled to work.

But I had 'flu (and don't even get me started on that "man flu" bollocks that is such an unfunny running joke in this country), so I was confined to bed, unable even to go to work and spend time with the few buddies who were still here. Nope, instead I lay in bed on Christmas Day until about 3pm, only rising to make a Beechams Hot Lemon drink when the banging headaches and joint pains were getting a bit much.

I know there's people out there who have far more miserable Christmases than that, but this is my rant and god-dammit if I'm not going to be a bit selfish! (I also hate how political correctness dictates the necessity of a paragraph like this one, but that's another post all of its own)

Anyway. This Christmas is fortunately shaping up to be a lot better, as my now-wife Jane and I are spending our first Christmas on our own as a married couple.

It's not that I don't like spending time with people, you understand.

Actually, that's a lie. It's EXACTLY that I don't like spending time with people. Especially stressed-out people which, it often seems to me, is becoming more and more a part of the holiday season. The clue's in the name, people! A holiday should be a break, not an excuse to panic over a fat-ass turkey and whether or not you've got enough bloody vol-au-vents to feed Uncle Boggart.

Breathe.

So, there you have it.

I hope you, if you're reading this, have a better experience in the wintertime than either I or several of my friends have had or, in some cases, are having.

And if you do have friends who are having a tough winter, give them a hug. Sometimes it's all you need to let someone know you care, and it immediately makes things feel that much better.

I know, I'm a big girl, but I don't care.

Merry Christmas.

HUMBUG!!!

On Evil

After completing Fallout 3 recently, I suddenly had a hankering to return to Oblivion, a game I hadn't played for well over a year. Fallout had tickled my free-roaming Western RPG bone (if there is such a thing, and I don't invite you to postulate where it might be in the comments) and I wanted more.

Oblivion is one of those RPGs I've started at least ten times with different characters to experiment with different things. The thing I've really liked about it every time I've played it is that each time I emerge from those Imperial sewers I can wander off in a different direction and do something completely different. One time I went straight for the main quest (and didn't finish it). One time I headed straight for the Arena in the Imperial City to kick some ass (bare-handed on that occasion, that was an entertaining challenge). One time I headed for the Mages' Guild and took that questline to its conclusion. Yet another time I decided to explore the dungeons scattered around the landscape, simply to acquire as much loot as possible.

But there's one thing that all these trips into the wilderness had in common – they all involved me being "good". Not once did I veer towards the dark side, bad Jedi, Renegade, negative reputation, whatever you want to call it. I always do this. In any game that promises "moral choices" I inevitably end up playing the "good guy" because, at heart, despite my grumpy old man persona, I'm a good guy. I even did this in Fallout 3, where it's kind of "all right" to be a bit of a bastard because, well, everyone else is.

Not this time, though. I decided that this time was going to be the time I went very, very bad in Oblivion.

I started by hunting down the Gray Fox to start the Thieves' Guild questline, which I promptly made my way through. For those of you unfamiliar with it (and be aware there are spoilers ahead) this sequence of quests takes you from lowly burglar up to an extremely high-profile thief, culminating in you stealing one of the series' titual Elder Scrolls from the Imperial Palace. By the time you've pulled this off, if you're anything like me, you feel like you're a badass thief, but you also feel faintly bad for taking advantage of the blind monks you stole it from.

This is nothing – nothing – compared to how sullied you feel after completing the Dark Brotherhood questline, however.

The Dark Brotherhood come to you in your sleep after you commit your first unprovoked murder in the game. In my case, this happened as part of a sidequest I happened to be completing at the time. I had two possible solutions to the quest, which essentially revolved around a captured bandit and his lover having a disagreement. My choices were to either betray the bandit or his lover. I elected to betray his lover, who had put across the impression of being something of a heartless bitch anyway, and after all, honour among thieves and all that.

Actually, "betray" doesn't quite sum up what I did to her. I broke back into her house while she was sleeping and shot her in the head with a magic arrow, which exploded and sent her flying, smacking straight into her ceiling before collapsing in a crumpled heap in front of her fireplace. This spectacle was faintly amusing, as ragdoll physics deaths are often wont to be, but the ominous words across the top of the screen "Your murder has been witnessed by forces unknown…" sent a slight chill down my spine. Sure, I'd stolen stuff before, but the Thieves' Guild questline had felt faintly "Robin Hood"-ish. This was getting into full-on evil territory now, and I wasn't sure I liked it.

I also wasn't sure I liked it when a mysterious robed gentleman visited me while I was sleeping off a level gain and offering me membership in the Dark Brotherhood conditional on my murdering an old, helpless man named Rufio.

In for a penny, in for a pound. I killed Rufio and thus began my run through what many believe to be Oblivion's best questline. The Dark Brotherhood storyline is a tale of murder, betrayal and vengeance filled with a lot of violence and some excellent plot twists, some of which are left for the player to interpret themselves, which is a touch I really liked. For example, one late quest in the sequence has you picking up a series of "dead drop" orders containing the names and locations of people for you to assassinate. Now, you can blindly continue through this sequence of assassinations by simply following your quest log's instructions – but if you actually look at the dead drop items in your inventory, you may spot that at a certain point, the "handwriting" that the notes are written in changes. At the time, I simply figured this to be some variation or inconsistency in the presentation but it actually turned out to be an extremely pertinent piece of information.

I had a massive amount of fun with the Dark Brotherhood questline but, as I say, it left me feeling faintly soiled. The experience I had, though, plus the fact that it had an actual emotional impact on me – arguably a more powerful emotional impact than a "good" questline – makes me more inclined to check out more "evil" options in other games from the outset. I know I'm certainly keen to try Fallout again as a more "evil" character in the future, if only because Fallout makes a big deal of the fact that your choices are supposed to have pretty major consequences later in the game. I'm yet to see if this actually is the case, but I'm certainly interested to find out.

Now, of course, my Oblivion character is on a quest for redemption. Wish her luck.

We're Doing It Wrong

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My hatred and loathing for my home country of the UK has been well documented both on these pages, on Twitter and in various other places that I've deposited little pockets of mental detritus around the Web. The reasons for this are manifold, of course, but the recent US elections highlighted one of the reasons that I don't feel proud to be British, English, United Kingdomish, whatever you want to call me.

Congratulations, by the way, America. You made the right choice by electing Obama as President-elect, the first black President the US has ever seen (a fact the BBC were fond of reminding us roughly every ten seconds during their coverage). You have elected a leader who is intelligent, articulate and inspirational – a leader who certainly gives the impression that he can make a difference and who inspires trust in the things he says. His acceptance speech made me want to shed a tear and made me feel proud and patriotic… towards America.

I'm sure pretty much everyone has seen this by now, but here we go again:

The man is a fantastic public speaker, it can't be denied – even if you don't agree with everything he says, or doubt he'll be able to get the job done, or whatever… there's no denying that he knows how to instill confidence and pride in a crowd.

We get this:

This is Gordon Brown. He is our Prime Minister. Our unelected Prime Minister, I might add, who sat waiting for Blair to resign like a rabid dog waiting to pounce on a hunk of meat before jumping in and continuing the mess his predecessor had created.

There are many things I object to about Gordon Brown and his government. The biggest thing that struck me about the US election is that I actually cared about the outcome. I cared about the candidates. I was keen for Obama to win because I supported him as a person, I supported what he stood for and I found him an inspirational candidate. I felt uneasy about McCain and particularly about the Evil Ice Bitch that stood with him with her strangely plastic face. Conversely, I've watched several UK elections over the years and not one of them has inspired the same kind of pride, patriotism and edge-of-the-seat excitement that the US elections did. This is largely to do with the fact that our politicians are boring and uninspiring, as clearly demonstrated above.

Couple this with the fact that they seem to make consistently stupid decisions, particularly when it comes to things like criminal rights, education and the like, and I can say with some confidence that I have roughly 0% confidence and trust in our government… and the trouble is that the "other sides" don't inspire much confidence either. David Cameron is a posh public-school boy who is widely regarded as "out of touch" with much of society. I will likely vote for him in the next election purely because I've seen what a hash Gordon Brown and the Labour Party have made in the last few years, but I know that it's unlikely there will be any great change. Our "third option", the Liberal Democrats, may as well not exist because they consistently gain so little votes in the elections that their presence is merely an annoyance to the "big two" parties.

Our MPs are fond of that particularly odious brand of management-speak and obfuscation of what they actually mean through dumb buzz-words. (I realise "obfuscation" may qualify as one of those words, but I like it.) None of them will ever answer a direct question. I realise that this is nothing new, but it does little to inspire confidence. Obama has, conversely, in the speeches I have witnessed so far, been relatively plain-speaking and comes across as honest. Time will tell if he can live up to his promises, but at least I'm feeling pretty good about him at the moment.

I don't see any change forthcoming in the UK. Each new generation of politicians in this country is more boring, dull, morose and out-of-touch than the last. Each new generation is doing more and more damage to the country in the name of being "progressive" and encouraging "diversity" when in fact all they are doing is removing rights from people who deserve them and providing them to people who don't, like criminals and poorly-behaved children in schools. As a result, the country is becoming apathetic, with little to no respect for authority. There's no chance of any kind of "revolution" forthcoming because the country is so weary and exhausted by the constant beatdowns and the amount of effort it takes to get a straight answer out of a politician.

I realise this all sounds a bit Daily Mail-ish and for that I apologise. But I wanted to share my thoughts, post-election. I am filled with pride and "patriotism" (for want of a better word) towards America at the moment, but it only highlights the fact that we're doing it wrong here.

A Jedi in New York: Day 5

I'm writing this post retrospectively as Jane recovered yesterday and I spent the day feeling rather unpleasantly ill, finally experiencing the unpleasantness of vomiting first via my mouth then via my arse at about 5am. I feel a bit better now though, if tired. Maybe we're allergic to New York, maybe we picked up some weird virus, I don't know. But I think we're both over it now having spent some time talking to God.

Despite this, we had a great day yesterday. We visited the Natural History Museum which, despite getting up the earliest we've managed all week, we somehow didn't manage to get into until after lunch. This may have been partly due to our practical demonstration of the difference between "local" and "express" Metro trains – the latter of which was the first one we boarded today, then wondered why it sailed past the station for the Natural History Museum, then streets beyond it until we were well over 40 blocks away from where we wanted to be!

We're going back to the Museum today to see some other bits because we didn't have a lot of time to see things in the end, though we got a chance to see the dinosaurs and an interesting section on Asian peoples. We got kicked out at closing time though – 5:45 – so we decided to head down to the south end of Manhattan to take a look at Bodies… The Exhibition. I think most people know about this by now, but for the uninitiated, it's an exhibition showing how our bodies work via the means of real-life dissected bodies.

This wasn't as gross as I was expecting, interestingly. It was, however, interesting to see the different body parts, how they interact and what they actually look like. There were also some interesting displays on the blood supply to various parts of the body, where they had injected the veins and arteries with a special dye and then chemically "decomposed" the rest of the body, leaving only the blood vessels.

The other great thing about Bodies which I hadn't really considered before was its stunning use of lighting. The whole exhibition hall was very dark, with pools of light surrounding each major exhibit, but also focusing very tightly on small "body trivia" signs on the wall. The overall effect was very distinctive and memorable, and lent a huge amount of atmosphere to the whole exhibition.

Finally, once we had done this, it was time to go out for dinner to a restaurant I'd heard a little about from a few people and was intrigued to try, though it had a reputation for being expensive. I am referring to Ninja New York, a themed Japanese restaurant where you are served by ninjas and the food is self-proclaimed "high-end Japanese cuisine". The food was indeed tasty, and the "interactive" dishes, which often involved something exploding or having to pull a sword out of something followed by it emitting an atmospheric mist were great. We also got an after-dinner magic show by "New York's tallest ninja" who displayed some Derren Brown-style tricks to us which he admitted were inspired by the performer, and that he secretly hoped Derren Brown didn't get too popular in the States because he'd then be relegated to the status of "Oh hey, you're that guy who does stuff a bit like Derren Brown". His mastery of manipulation and misdirection was excellent though, and it was a great display to finish the meal with.

The only things with the Ninja restaurant was you need to be 1) really hungry (we had a five-course banquet…) 2) really rich (…for $50-$70 each) and 3) not mind that "recommendations" sometimes turn into "orders" without you remembering having ordered them (and to counter this, if something unexpected arrives, simply tell them… they're ninjas, they can handle it). All in all though, it was a fantastic meal that is worth experiencing, particularly, I would imagine, if you have kids.

We're flying home at 10pm local time tonight. Neither of us want to go home. We've started to feel "settled" here now and are coming to terms with New York's own little idiosyncrasies, although the Metro still occasionally bamboozles us. We'll definitely be back, without question.

A Jedi in New York: Day 4

Still here! Again, another short entry as it's pretty late, once again, and we both need our sleep! My legs are exhausted from the amount of walking we've both been doing.

Today we went to the Museum of Sex (surprisingly work-safe – the website, anyway) as it was something that little bit "different" to the norm, plus it was somewhere that we could again use our New York Passes.

There are three exhibitions on at the Museum at present – The Sex Lives of Animals, Sex and the Moving Image and a selection from the Museum's permanent collection.

First came the Animals section, which presented an interestingly "alternative" take on natural history and biology by focusing exclusively on the sexual behaviour of animals, mostly looking closely at unusual behaviour which in many cases, the curator describes, goes against Darwin's theories of natural selection, against Creationism and instead presents a third possibility.

In practical terms, this meant we got to look at videos of animals masturbating, fucking every possible way they could and even some discussion on homosexuality in animals, including the story of the gay penguins And Tango Makes Three which got banned from many, many educational institutions. It was interesting and, yes, different, as expected.

On the floor above was the Sex and the Moving Image exhibition. As the name implies, this exhibition charted the use of sex (or lack thereof) in movies from the earliest black and white silent films, where sex was mostly implied (with the exception of "stag" movies – early porn films, very few of which have survived due to their illegality at the time, but some examples of which were on, err, "display") through the more liberal approach that developed over the years, taking in (no pun intended) Russ Meyer and Deep Throat all the way to modern porn and celebrity sex tapes, contrasting hugely with how mainstream film deals with sexual encounters. There were also some shorter videos from Beautiful Agony (NSFW) showing different people's faces during orgasm, and a selection of sex-themed commercials from over the years.

Then in the final room we had the selections from the Museum's permanent collection, which included male and female RealDolls (sex dolls that run into the thousands of dollars due to their supposed "realism") to a selection of sex machines, including a terrifying-looking one that was essentially a rubber cock attached to a Black and Decker drill.

So that was nice.

Anyway, we spent rather longer in the Museum than we had intended, as we'd originally planned to move on to Bodies… The Exhibition and also potentially to go and see Ground Zero later in the day. However, we'd also made plans to meet up with the fine gentlemen Papapishu and Regulus for dinner in St Mark's Place at a Japanese joint called Kenka which is often filled with Japanese ex-pats, is very noisy, serves traditional Japanese food that isn't sushi (which I've never had before, and which proved to be delicious, even the deep-fried garlic) and serves terrifying "specials" such as bull penis.

So it's been a good day, only marred by the fact that Jane's not been feeling too well off-and-on since last night. I'm sure you'll all join me in wishing her a big "get well soon".

A Jedi in New York: Day 3

Hello again! This has to be the most blog updates I've done in a week since… ever, I guess. Nothing like having the time to sit back, relax and not have to worry about anything. Jane's currently soaking in a nice hot bath, we've had a nice meal at the hotel's restaurant and another great day.

Today we did two main things. Firstly, we revisited Central Park, this time to go to the Central Park Zoo. Jane was very excited about this – so much so that she appeared to be regressing to childhood. I have to admit, it having been a long time since I'd seen a zoo also, I was also keen to see the animals.

Central Park Zoo is relatively small in the grand scheme of zoos. We later discovered by finally reading the guidebook that we bought a couple of days before the wedding that the Bronx Zoo is the one to go to if you want a full-on large-scale zoo/safari-style experience. That's going to have to wait for another visit though, I think! This isn't to say that Central Park Zoo isn't good – far from it, in fact, as the relatively few displays of animals on offer mean that you can easily get around all of them and take plenty of photos.

We started by looking at the Rainforest section – an area where it is impossible for people to walk in without going "Oooh, it's hot in here!". Well, duh. In the Rainforest area we saw a huge variety of tropical birds and some amazing monkeys whose species escapes me for the moment, but they had huge bushy tails like squirrels that were very "expressive" in their own peculiar way.

Next up, we saw the polar bears, who were asleep. It occurred to us that it was entirely plausible for someone to go to one of these zoos and not see any animals if they were all asleep. I felt a little sorry for the polar bears as it was a relatively warm day today, but then I remembered how cold it had been for the last couple of days and determined that they were probably all right.

Moving around, we then saw a red panda, which looks more like a tree-hugging fox than a panda. It too was asleep, but at least it had the decency to sleep in a tree where you could see it.

Next we saw the snow monkeys of "see no evil" fame. These little guys were extremely active – running and jumping around and picking things off their feet. It's strange how watching a creature like a monkey do something that we do – picking fluff from between your toes, for example – is infinitely more interesting and amusing than seeing another human doing it.

Then we saw the penguins, which Jane was very excited about. The penguins lived in a darkened room that smelled of fish, and were extremely docile, swimming right up to the edge of their enclosure and posing for pictures. I was also impressed at their speed in the water considering their clumsiness on land – and the fact that they can throw themselves out of the water at high speed and then land upright without breaking a sweat.

So that was the zoo. Fun, and a worthwhile way to spend the morning.

This afternoon we took the three-hour Circle Line Island Tour, which circumnavigates the whole of Manhattan with a guided commentary. The tour we elected to go on at 3:30 also happened to coincide with sunset towards its end, so it was likely to be a good photo opportunity. Photos to follow when I've been through all of them – over a thousand now, I reckon. 🙂

A Jedi in New York: Day 2

A short post tonight as it's pretty late and we're both exhausted! It's been an interesting and fun day today, though, as we had another long walk and took in a Broadway show – specifically, Avenue Q, which proved to be both hilarious and touching.

Acquiring tickets for Avenue Q was less easy. Our New York Passes supposedly got us money off Broadway tickets if purchased through a ticket seller called Applause. We could have phoned them up to order, we later realised, but after waking up later than we'd intended and wolfing down some breakfast at, again, the Ritz (omelette today… tasty but not quite so enormous as the pancakes portion) we decided to pay Applause a visit and pick up some tickets.

Why Avenue Q? Two reasons. Firstly, we'd played a song from it in the last local pantomime that I'd taken part in. The song was "Purpose" and I found it pretty catchy, but knew nothing about the show it was from. Secondly, I remembered that Rampant Bicycle had mentioned the show a while back, along with a number of entertaining-sounding songs such as "The Internet is for Porn" – and also something about puppets. Puppets? I was intrigued.

But I digress. The offices for Applause were actually in an anonymous-looking office building of the type that bigger companies rent out tiny rooms in when they need a tiny bit more space. The depressing loss adjustment company I temped with for a short while (which, incidentally, made me come perilously close to hurling myself off a tall building from sheer boredom… despite tall buildings not being easy to come by in Eastleigh) hired out a tiny office to put their typing slaves (including myself) in. They rather naïvely supplied everyone with wireless Internet access, however, so I spent the majority of my time when I should have been listening to boring, slobbery old men dictating their boring, slobbery old reports about small hairline cracks extending from skirting boards to the ceiling surfing the Internet.

The point of that? Wandering down the corridor to the Applause office put me depressingly in mind of that horrible place. Fortunately, once we were inside we were greeted by a typical-looking ticket window, which is kind of the last thing you expect to see behind a door in a place like that. We were greeted by a friendly woman who sold us some tickets and gave us our discount, promising that we'd be able to pick up the tickets at the theatre half an hour before the performance that evening.

There's no amusingly tragic end to this story, if you're waiting for one. We picked up our tickets, we saw the show which was, as previously stated, great fun.

Also today we had planned on visiting Central Park Zoo (another attraction we could get into with our Passes) but the walk to Applause had been a long one so we decided to simply stroll around the park and enjoy the scenery. There are plenty more photos to come from there.

Tomorrow we are going to head for the Zoo and possibly one (or more) of the museums on our list.

A Jedi in New York: Day 1

Those of you who know me, follow me on Twitter or have been secretly watching me from the bushes will know that I got married to my beautiful and gorgeous now-wife Jane on Sunday 26th October. The wedding was a huge success thanks to the not inconsiderable labours of the new Mrs Jedi along with assistance and financial support from our respective parents. Some photos can be found here with more to follow – if you were in attendance at the wedding and have some photos to upload, please feel free to use the Upload button to contribute your own photographs.

Now we're over in New York for our honeymoon – yes, it's the land of Papapishu and Lord Regulus, and we arrived last night, so today was our first full day here. I've decided to blog the experience (most of it, at least…) as a nice record of what we got up to. Like the wedding, there will be photos to follow upon our return – watch this space for details of where to find them.

So what did we get up to today? Quite a few things, actually, considering the fact that we decided today would be a day of "wandering" and discovering things rather than setting out to specifically do something. The only task we had to complete today was to pick up our New York Pass, a cool little card that Jane found out about before we left. Essentially, it's a card that allows you free or discounted entry to a lot of the popular New York attractions such as the Empire State Building, the Guggenheimer, Madame Tussauds and numerous others, as well as money off Broadway tickets and food at various restaurants.

We began our day with breakfast at the Ritz Diner on East 62nd Street at 1st Avenue (or whichever way around you're supposed to say them), a pleasant little dive that we found on our first night here. It's a 24-hour traditional American diner with a huge menu (the kind that Gordon Ramsay would immediately want to set fire to and jump up and down on) and cheap prices. I had a stack of pancakes with eggs (sunny side – partly because I can never remember the American expressions for the different types of eggs except that one) and Jane had some waffles with bananas and blueberries. The breakfast was so enormous we theorised that it would be enough to sustain us for the whole day's activities… and we weren't wrong.

After that, we glanced at our guidebooks to attempt to work out which way we had to go to pick up our New York Pass. We knew it was somewhere in the region of Times Square but didn't really know how to get there. It turned out we had to head vaguely West. So we did, crossing 1st, 2nd and 3rd Avenue and being momentarily confused by the lack of a 4th Avenue and instead having a Lexington, Madison and Park Avenue before we reached the famous 5th Avenue.

Upon reaching 5th, we had a stroll down it to look at the man shops, including, of course, the striking exterior of the Apple Store. I resisted the temptation to go in but took some photos of the outside of the building because, after all, it's interesting to look at. But enough of that. We continued along 5th until we came to the corner of 45th Street, down which we turned because we'd noticed earlier on our guide map that we could pick up our Passes from Planet Hollywood which just happened to be on 45th Street and Broadway.

Down 45th Street I came across a sight which made us both chuckle a little – the Big Apple Hostel. Now, the location of this place is amazing – about 2 minutes' walk away from Broadway – but from the outside it looks like the least inviting place in the history of ever. The fact that it stands right next to a distinctly pleasant-looking coffee house makes it seem all the more out-of-place, particularly given its proximity to the glitz of Broadway and Times Square.

Finally we reached Planet Hollywood and picked up our Passes. We stopped at the bar to have a milkshake – by this time, it was lunchtime, but given the enormous size of our breakfasts we weren't feeling hungry in the slightest, so we settled for a simple drink and an ogle at the cheesiness that is the interior of that place.

Upon leaving PH, we strolled down Broadway. The sun had come out now after a dull start to the day with a few minutes of rain, so I took the opportunity to take a lot of photos. I'm finally starting to work out what the different settings on my still-quite-new Nikon D40 DSLR do, as will hopefully be evidenced by the photos I've taken. The photos certainly look nice on the camera's built-in LCD – I guess it remains to be seen if they still look good on a monitor!

Jane led me down Broadway to an unknown destination – to me, at least. Said destination became immediately apparent once we reached East 34th Street and we saw the Empire State Building rising majestically into the skies. We decided that now would be a good time to ascend the gigantic building and also to take the New York Skyride simulator tour. Yes, we are doing gratuitously touristy things, and I'm sure those of you who live in or know NYC will be groaning at what we've done so far, but what the hell. The last time I came to New York I was four years old and can remember precisely jack shit about it, while Jane had been more recently but had ascended the tower on a very cold day when visibility wasn't great.

The view from the top of the ESB was predictably fantastic (and yes, there were yet more photos taken) but the other thing which struck me about the building was the sheer number of queues you had to join in order to get to the top. There's a queue to get through security. There's a queue to get your tickets. There's a queue to get in the elevator to the 80th floor. There's a queue on the 80th floor to get in the elevator to the 86th floor, where the observation deck is. Once you've finished viewing the, err, view, there's a queue to get down to the 80th floor, then a queue to get to the elevator to the 2nd floor… you get the idea. The whole experience, which was, let's face it, getting in an elevator and going to the top of a really tall building, took over 3 hours altogether.

This sounds somewhat cynical. I don't want to give the impression that ascending the ESB is a worthless experience – far from it, as the view at the top is spectacular. However, one shouldn't go into it with the foolish assumption that I had, which was that it would be relatively straightforward to get in and get to the top!

Following our visit to the ESB, we decided we were hungry and decided to return to Planet Hollywood for dinner, as our two New York Passes gave us $20 off our meal there. While Planet Hollywood may not be the classiest cuisine in town, it was certainly very tasty and gave us the energy we needed to get back to the hotel.

It was a long walk around, but we covered a lot today, and I developed my "feel" for the area enormously. Before today, my knowledge of New York geography was extremely sketchy, despite playthroughs of Project Gotham and Grand Theft Auto. Incidentally, Grand Theft Auto has the "feel" of New York pretty much perfect (in my outsider's opinion) and I recognised Times Square from both Project Gotham and Forza Motorsport 2. Kudos. No pun intended.

No idea what we're covering tomorrow, but I'll post if I get a moment! In the meantime, for those who are really, really interested, here's a Google Map of today's trip.

Fuck the Internet

Okay… the irony of saying "fuck the Internet" on a blog post isn't lost on me, but bear with me. There's a rant and a half coming your way right about now about, paradoxically enough, people moaning. However, I feel rather more justified in my meta-moaning than the whiny little sods I will be discussing throughout the next few paragraphs.

But first, a little history lesson, if you'll indulge me for a sec.

My family had been online junkies since before the Internet was a widespread global phenomenon. An irregular "treat" for us was to be able to use our Atari with its mighty 300bps modem to dial up to a local bulletin board system, read some messages and maybe download some BASIC games to play. At the time, I thought this was incredily cool. Looking back, at the time, it was incredibly cool. I mean, being able to use your telephone line to dial into someone else's computer and do stuff with it? Neat.

A few years later came CompuServe, which was a step closer to the "real" Internet, at the time still very much in its infancy for consumers. CompuServe offered a service that was essentially hundreds of these bulletin board services, called "forums" along with news, entertainment and real-time chat services. Again, it was something of a "treat" to be able to go online and look at stuff and to actually be able to communicate with other people. As a matter of fact, as a result of a message exchange between myself and another chap on the CompuServe Gamers' Forum, ten levels that I had created for Wolfenstein 3D made their way onto the official Apogee "Super Upgrades" expansion pack for Wolf3D, netting me a cool $200. I still have a (now very faded) photocopy of the cheque as I thought that was so awesome.

A while into the "CompuServe Age", I read an article in PC Format magazine discussing this new and interesting-sounding thing called the Internet. The article was awash with buzzwords like "telnet", "FTP" and curious sounding things with lots of dots and coms in them. But it was still quite some time before CompuServe actually offered full Internet access.

Now here we are, some ten-to-fifteen years later. Web 2.0 in all its self-publishing, self-expressing, lower-case logo glory is upon us offering anyone with a pulse the opportunity to spill their guts on the Internet and share their innermost thoughts and feelings on a whole variety of topics.

This, on the surface, is a great thing. Never before have people had such an opportunity to self-publish anything they like – be it creative writing, academic research, odes to the fit girl in class 3B or simply waffly old bollocks like this place. Why, then, do so many people feel the need to use this great medium to batter down anything around them?

I have two recent examples of this, though these are by no means isolated examples. They are merely the most recent things where this issue has cropped up. Firstly, we have the "new Facebook". Secondly, we have EA's new game Spore. Let's take these two things in turn.

First up is Facebook. Facebook is such a global phenomenon that I heard on the news this week (on the radio, how old-school of me) that they're planning on making a movie (presumably of the docu-drama variety) on the site's rise to success.

For the unfamiliar… actually, balls to that, even my Mum has a Facebook account. You all know what Facebook is. Let's not forget that it's a free service supported almost entirely by ads that anyone can sign up for and use and never have to pay a penny. It's a social tool that's allowed millions of people across the world to connect with one another and rediscover old friendships after many years, in some cases. In short, it's a pretty marvellous thing that both Facebook themselves and numerous third parties keep adding new features to.

So recently Facebook redesigned their site, changing the way the functionality of the site works and, to me, making it rather more streamlined and clean. It also uses more of the browser window which, when you're working on a 1920×1200 screen, is most welcome. They've obviously worked hard on this site redesign and are still tweaking things even as we speak – each time I log on I see some new little feature that makes navigation and use of the site even easier.

So how does the community at large respond? By creating "OMG 1 MILLION PEOPLE MUST JOIN THIS GROUP AND STAND UP FOR OUR RIGHTS! NEW FACEBOOK SUCKS!". You'd think that Facebook had summoned the spirit of Hitler and then allowed it to rape all the world's children before taking a chainsaw to them, while the shareholders sat in the background wanking and laughing. But no – they've done what any good website does every few years, they've had a refresh and a redesign – and, compared to many websites' complete overhauls that I've seen over the years, this has been a fairly minor one in the grand scheme of things. You can still do everything you used to be able to, and more so in many cases.

So why bitch and moan? It escapes me. Do these people seriously think that getting a million people together in a group that is HOSTED ON THE FUCKING SITE THEY ARE COMPLAINING ABOUT – the site they aren't paying a penny to support yet are happily cluttering up bandwidth with their photos and videos – is going to achieve jack shit? Why bother? Fuck the Internet.

Why bother complaining about the complainers? It makes me feel better. One may argue that all these people are doing is "making themselves feel better" also, but the fact is, it is Facebook's prerogative to change their site as and when they want to – whether it is from the perspective of improving the users' experience (they must be sitting around thinking "Those ungrateful bastards" right now) or from the perspective of increasing advertising revenue (which for a site that doesn't make much money from its users is perfectly reasonable).

Next rant. Spore.

Spore's a great game that came out this week. From Will Wright, creator of the Sim games (and the The Sims games, natch) it allows you to… again, I'm sure you all know about Spore already, so I'll cut to the chase.

Spore ships with some security software by Sony called SecuROM. SecuROM is a system that is designed to protect discs against being copied and installed by hundreds of people… i.e. piracy. As such, it limits a purchaser of a copy of Spore to installing it on three separate machines. That's not, as many people have assumed, three installations and then it's all over… that's three machines.

Who has three machines? How many people, apart from people with more money than sense, buy a new PC gaming rig often enough to make this an issue? I buy a computer roughly once every five to seven years and it serves me fine in that time, unless I want to run something like Crysis – which fortunately I have no interest in whatsoever.

EA released a statement quoting usage and activation statistics from the Spore Creature Creator, released some months prior to the full game. While Creature Creator's stats may not necessarily reflect exactly the same userbase as Spore, the figures were telling. Most users activated the product on one computer. A few did it on two. And about 1% tried to activate on more than three. I'm often loathe to believe company hyperbole, but in this case those figures certainly seem a reasonable assumption in my experience at least. I don't think I know anyone who has more than one computer for gaming purposes. Sure, I know some guys who have PCs for gaming and Macs for professional/creative work, but even then, that's still only two computers.

The nonsense with Spore went way overboard. Amazon.com was bombarded with over 1700 one-star reviews of the game, very few of which commented on the game at all. Several users bandied the word "draconian" around and many promising to go and pirate the game rather than purchase it – indeed, the main argument that many people were throwing around was the fact that somehow Spore had been leaked, cracked and torrented even before the game's street date, thereby, to these people, making the DRM pointless.

The fact is, were there not such wanton levels of piracy on the Internet today, these measures wouldn't be necessary – and the people on Amazon who claimed that pirating the game was "making a stand" are simply adding to the problem, not making a point. EA's a big company and they have to be seen to be doing something more than plugging their fingers in their ears and going "lalalala" on the subject of piracy. While DRM clearly doesn't work as it should at present, at least it represents a symbolic gesture on EA's part to help tackle the problem.

The fact is that Spore's actually a great game, but all this nonsense has put lots of people off playing it, for completely unjustified and ill-informed reasons. It'd be lovely if just, for once, people on the Internet could sit down, appreciate what someone else has done for them, pay for it if it's a paid-for service (like Spore) and appreciate it being free if it's a free service (like Facebook) without bitching and moaning any time some tiny little change to the "norm" comes along. I'm sure there's something Orwellian in there somewhere…

Anyway. Rant over. Assuming no-one else pisses me off my next few posts will be about Spore and other games I'm playing at the moment!