Archive for January, 2007
Tell them their pillar of faith is ascending
Jet black skies and amber incandescence. My sordid affair with the English language is an issue of consternation for some people. I view communication as one of the more necessary and sometimes enjoyable aspects of existence so my cudgel-like approach to it is right to cause concern. I view the English written language as something to play with and tickle in the right places akin to a kitten, whereas others only see rules to obediently follow, tongue lolling at the prospect of dangling past-participles. That analogy was originally going to be clay-based but who am I to deny a kitten based segue?
I have never been classically trained in the fine art of English language; I was given the boot-campesque course in grammar and spelling served in, what I presume, most public schools worth their salt offer but it took my own initiative to learn semi-colon usage and past-participle meaning and then dutifully ignoring them. The classically trained people went to grammar schools, imagine, entire schools devoted to the pursuit of grammatical perfection. Those people are the ones who look down their noses at you were you to misuse practise and practice, as if it’s some kind of literary genocide to add an apostrophe ess onto the end of a word which already ends in an ess.
That sort of thinking doesn’t make a good bedfellow for me, simply because it places a restriction on expression. I’m not talking about some lentil-based hippy utopia where we can all scatter apostrophes to the breeze and correct adverb or pronoun usage is a dark art. If I want to begin a sentence with a conjunction I feel no compulsion not to do it, it doesn’t denigrate the paper-thin message I’m trying to convey nor does it make me break out into an obsessive compulsive twitch like I’ve seen it do. My writing tends to parch and warp when I start applying rules, contractions run for the hills and brackets are an endangered species, all in the name of some puritanical grammatical doctrine.
I have been writing in one form or another since I crested double digits, from my adventures in anthropomorphism with my two pet cats through to my seminal horror foray to sequential writing on varying topics of little to no worth on the tinterweb. I enjoy writing for what it can convey and seeing how far the English language can grow and change rather than be restricted in some historical and nostalgic bog.
No compassion, nothing matters, my resistance is waning
Just Cause isn’t a particularly smart, deep or polished game and is essentially GTA on a South American island. Wherein GTA had a bustling city of protesting road-kill and myriad hidey-holes, Just Cause has a massive area of tropical vegetation to ride into or cruise over. As quickly as you hit the ground in the spectacular opening sequence you’ll want to leave it; constrained at once by narrow roads and unforgiving traffic as you progress you’ll find more and more ways to get to the nearest air-capable vehicle.
The story based missions are staccato run-and-gun sequences, punctured by the sloppy and uninformative radio chatter from your supposedly wise cracking handler and his fish-faced sidekick. The one-liners from your swarthy avatar are immediately inappropriate and quickly grating. For all it’s club-footed approach to sandbox gaming, Just Cause does have an innate but well-buried charm. The aircraft, be that helicopter gunship or gargantuan cargo plane, are simple to use and just as fun to fly as well as to leap out of at 2 kilometres in the impossibly azure sky. Drifting down onto the lush island with the sun cresting a nearby inactive volcano and morning mist sweeping around you, it’s hard not to feel gob smacked, quickly melting into blissful appreciation.
Just Cause feels like a holiday, the kind of holiday you wouldn’t like to take but would love to play along with. The auto-targeting makes shoot-outs a shooting gallery, primary missions and side-missions (of which there an endless supply) are easy and sometimes exhilarating all the while you obtain a sense of progression as you turn the political map from turquoise, to angry red then accomplishment green.
In a crash the cars may stick together like velcro, the enemies may be both trigger happy and appalling marksmen and the game may glitch you into the island furniture at times but if you can accept the flaws there’s a good time to be had. Just Cause isn’t a good idea implemented badly, but a collection of smart ideas slightly tarnished.
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Here be dragons
The problem with updating this thing on a regular basis is that I risk falling into an all-too-familiar trap of posting a dirge and not imparting anything worth the text that speaks about it. Literary diarrhoea I believe is the term. I could take my writing in any direction I choose. I’ve found that trying to stick to a purely technical theme means I run dry; anime blogging has been beaten to death and then set on fire by so many others, besides, picking apart individual episodes is tedious and pointless; I’ve never read any gaming blogs before but I would imagine my gaming throughput and general immersion (or lack thereof) in their culture would have to be greater and more polarised for it to be worthwhile. This really only leaves me with personal or fictional writing. I like to think I am adept at writing fiction but don’t engage in it often enough to warrant a dated blog structure. And so, I’m left to personal writing; I try to steer away from the diary paradigm (I went to class today and feel asleep then went to a café then went down a literary garden path) and at least try and make a point.
But then I get the crazy idea that maybe the minutiae of my life aren’t worth scrutinising. A typical day (and there are more and more of them recently) consists of the following sequence: get up, walk to work while listening to music, spend an hour checking over almost work-related sites (digg, slashdot, various forums), spend the rest of the morning working on whatever is top priority, lunch, spend two hours fighting back sleep then the rest of the afternoon working, home, tea, anime/gaming/whatever, sleep. As an itemised list that mechanically makes up 5/7 of my week; mentally it’s a case of “where to start?”.
My walk to work is defined by what my music player has as it’s album of the day, it sets the tempo for the rest of the day and woe betide me to meddle with my music players hotline to chance. My morning is spent coming up with random thoughts: webcomics with Flickr like hotspots for interesting words or how webcomics could become more searchable and accessible with plain-text scripts or how the next person to reveal themselves as an Apple zealot will have me buying the iPhone just so I can beat them with it. My lunchtime is spent on the lookout for the attractive young woman who I seem to meet on a frequent basis so I can have my daily dose of “Should I say something, what have I got to lose apart from my dignity?”. The afternoon usually brings feelings of resentment towards my job and chosen way of life, untamed disdain at how mediocre I am and how spectacular I wish to be. Evenings bring sweet release from structure but in such criminally short spaces of time. Rinse, repeat.
Then there are days like today where I’m so clouded with head-slime I forgo work to try and recover. Sick days are terrible if you’re actually sick because you’re on borrowed time, time you otherwise wouldn’t have and you’re so crippled by disease (this morning I believed I had the SARS) that you can’t do any of what you would like to. I settled for playing more Just Cause, cleaning the kitchen and writing quoteTangent which now adorns the bottom right corner of the rapidly expanding sidebar. Expect a more diligent description of my handwork (click the author) at a later date.
So once again I’m inconclusive as to what this blog is supposed to do. I don’t write for anyone but myself and yet I still make things public for others to read, otherwise I would just write on a piece of paper or a local word processor file. Maybe this is just a cry for help, a vacuous self-flagellating diatribe spawned from thesaurus-fuelled evenings; however I look at it, this is my life and I’m being myself, so no one can tell me I’m doing it wrong.
You better understand that I won’t hold your hand
I have tried to come up with something to write about the team meeting I had with the senior-partners of the company I work for, but there is nothing of substance to say. We all spoke, we all listened, we all came up with solutions to problems I had and problems the senior management had. There really couldn’t have been a more satisfying way for the meeting to have been conducted and concluded. It certainly gave me a far better outlook on my professional life (if you can really call what I do professional).
I cobbled together a Wordpress plugin for the del.icio.us sidebar feature a few afternoons ago and it, surprisingly, worked first time. Putting it on the Dreamhost server on the other hand caused a bit of a problem. While PHP officially supports HTTPS the Dreamhost build of PHP doesn’t which means you can’t use a straight file_get_contents call to grab the relevant XML. I switched to using CURL which is a bit of a heavy handed solution to a simple problem, especially if I’m willing to switch to using an RSS feed. The plugin itself is fairly simple and caches the results to a file which it refreshes every six hours. At the minute the options for the plugin are hardcoded so once I get some spare time (read: 6 or more months) I’ll integrate them into the Wordpress database options scheme and release (what I’ve hilariously called) deliciousTangent.
With my recent acquirement of a microphone I’ve joined Skype so that I can pretend I’m actually going to talk with people. One of my original Grand Plans™ for this website was to set up some video-capture hardware and do some decent game guides (Kasumi from DOA4 was first on the list) but the number of drivers for Hauppage products for Windows x64 is (as far as I can tell) zero. There were conspiratorial posts on forums that spoke of a 3rd party drivers and dark rituals to obtain them but the trail became very convoluted very quickly. My next thought was to impress my British accent on an audio file (“netcast” sounds stupid, “podcast” is an evil word borne of sin and “blogcast” is just retarded) and after being assured my voice is not as grating as I believe it is, I may still go ahead with it.
Of course the question is begged: what I could talk about that I couldn’t in writing? Realistically nothing, but I feel verbal monologues can express topics far better in a far shorter amount of time (ah inflection, how I miss thee in text, emphasis just doesn’t cut it). My options are varied and it would certainly break up the huge block of text that greets you on every page of the site so far. If I were taking photos every day or in the mood to perhaps potatoshop humorous graphics to accompany my rants perhaps you would be spared the auditory atrocity I may yet release onto this world.
Procrastination hard at work
I promised on my gallery front page an explanation about why I took down some of the more popular galleries; along with that I may as well cover the ins and outs of releasing the code behind it as I’ve had requests from varying people about it. Grab yourselves a beverage as this may take a while.
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When did the flame burn so high and get so hot
As much as I’d like to think I have some semblance of verbal ability, I really don’t. I “work” best in small groups because there is a level of conversation that lends itself to being joined, whereas in larger groups it becomes a waiting game: you wait for your chance to speak and grab it when the opportunity arises. Of course larger groups also lend themselves to extroverts who dominate the conversation, finally in their element. The Internet has informed me that I am an introvert. It doesn’t feel gratifying to admit it, I worry too much that I’d use it as an excuse for avoiding social niceties rather than trying to progress past it.
I’m getting off on a tangent here, my main point is that I can’t seem to generate conversation where none exists already. I can carry, nurture and develop a conversation, but the opening lines, the ice breakers elude me. My favourite trick in these situations is to do my deer-in-headlights impersonation, practised and refined. The problem with generating conversation when I don’t really know a person is the fact that I wouldn’t want them doing it to me if I didn’t know them.
I met the girl again I spoke about before, not as fleetingly this time; I had many minutes to construct whole sentences and scenarios, even my friend tried desperately to lengthen my opportunities (as any good wingman would) but it was all for naught. The best opener I could envisage was: “I saw you at Tesco the other day”, where it went from there I had no idea. I could blame it on the aspect of surprise but really I’m just being a social retard.
It is something I have to work on; I know my limits and I know my strengths but “not being able to start a conversation” ranks pretty highly on my list of weaknesses. Up until my formative university days I counted small-talk as the bane of my life, a ridiculous pretence to more interesting endeavours. But effort and experience has shown that not agreeing with social lubrication does not necessarily mean you can ignore it. Perhaps my difficulty with starting conversations stems from my lack of observation of when people have done it to me, or perhaps my foolish pride still prevents me from taking a chance where the outcome could be embarrassing. Such pride I need to shed.
