At The Changing Of The Year

This morning I was woken with a text beep and realised suddenly that it's New Year's Eve to-day, and not (as I had thought) "in a couple of days". Yes, big deal I forgot the date, so what? These days its easy to synchronise your date with everyone else, what with The Internet and those new toasters that burn the date into the bread.

But there was a time before all that, where not everyone was on the same page. You couldn't simply read your toast and know where you were on the orbit. You had to work. It. Out. Only the wealthy could afford to "keep up to date" and indeed that is where the phrase came from. It was a sign of status that one knew what date it was and how many sleeps there were until christmas. The poor of course had no idea when it was and often kept working until they died, believing they were only 6 years old and that it was noon.

Each house would keep their own calendar, compiled from haphazard viewings of the sun and stars. The Family Calendar was a strikingly complicated chart, emblazoned with the crest and often featured extra months or days. Some noble calendars believed that the first 3 months repeated themselves twice at the beginning of the year. It was all guess work and highly inaccurate. I find it hilarious to think of these old English aristocrats rooting around in their Diembulary, shuffling old papers and mumbling about angles.

Diane Arbus, Why You Buggin?

Above: An emotional scene from Fur where Diane Arbus (left) fights off imperial troopers with her lover Han Solo.

Department of Commerce

I received this letter from the Department of Commerce yesterday and now I'm worried I'll go to Gaol! Is anyone in my readership a lawyer?! Fuck!

Fbook

So, I'm just fed up with Fbook. I'm always getting messages in my inbox from Fbook about someone having sent me a message. So...instead of just being able to read the message, I have to click on a link then sign in to Fbook and then click through its labyrinthine interface trying to find what you want in order to read what could have easily been an email. Remember email? Yeah, that'll be the thing you'll go back to using after Fbook disappears in a matter of months.

And then came the plugins and third party applications. Wonderful. Now I get messages in my inbox like "Margret has sent you a gremlin!" and I have to download some program in order to find out what the hell is going on and why I've been given a gremlin. But its not going to be that easy! Oh no! You have to click on the link in the email, then you have to download the program, then you have to configure it and install it on your profile and select a whole bunch of features and people to connect it to. And after you've done all that, you just get spat back out to the Fbook page and there's no indication of where the gremlin is or what its doing!

The one or two times I've wanted to use a feature on this hula hoop of a website, I have either been thwarted by its inscrutable interface or its been broken and "unavailable" well...fuck you Fbook. Why the hell should I care if someone wrote on my wall? Or what idiots I went to kindergarten with are doing? They're all just using Fbook and sending magic winks and flying saucers to eachother.

I didn't get myspace and that has imploded, now we wait for Fbook to implode...start the clock.

UPDATE: The police have found the gremlin...it was in the Fbook serverfarm chewing wires for a few months but was dead when they found it. It just goes to show: there's no nutritional value in wires.

The Trials of Tamika

Sex(?!?!) On the beach...?

So there I was with my good friend Sean on the beach last night. I hadn't seen Sean in 6 months because he was in Belgium and I wasn't. Sean was explaining how the sky is low in Belgium and I was asking him to explain...that all sounds very innocent, but up toward the dunes a figure in black peeled away and started to follow us.

Figures in black are clearly very ominous, and he may have had a red right hand, I don't know. But when Sean and I stopped walking to gesture at the sky, he kept coming and walked right up to us. At about the 10m mark, we could sense his vibes and I gave him a nod and a flat "hi" to break whatever spell he was trying to weave. He didn't respond.

Now he's up close and personal and his hands are in his pockets (flag!) and he's just staring at us. Maybe 6 waves break before he says "whats up?" Sean took a step back and I wondered if I should do the same, but felt it may initiate a chase or stabbing sub-routine, so I stayed there and kept my eyes on him.
"We're just walking." I said and as if he was a continent, he allowed the waves to mark the passage of time, another 5 waves speak.
"...just walking..."
"yep." I said
I was broadcasting on the "what the fuck do you want?" frequency but he was still there.
"Okay no offense." he says and walks away. Sean immediately resumes talking about the height of the sky in Belgium until he's a safe distance away. We punctuated the chat with wide eyes and mouthed exasperations. I really don't know what he wanted.

The obvious answer is that he was cruising for sex, but he was there already before we reached him in black on the empty beach...on a Monday night. And why stick around when people are unwelcoming and step away from you? He hung around in the dark and came walking back towards us, but we stayed ahead of him. I said to Sean he would return to his wife who wouldn't even ask where he'd been.

MR GAY

Mario Galaxy is great, I don't know what else to say. It's a mind blowing achievement in great level design. The joy of playing which is the central philosophy of Mario games is extended to encompass the possibilities of outerspace. It will captivate you for hours at a time and it's so bursting with diverse gameplay types and varied level design that you can't get bored.

It's funny because even though it uses the most conventional control set up, Galaxy is perhaps the best use of the Wii remote we've seen. Why? Because it doesn't shove all the motion features into places it isn't needed.

Where it does use the remote's features, it enhances the experience. You point the remote at the screen to collect the hundreds of little gemmy star bits littered around the levels, its effortless and unexpectedly fun. Shake the remote and Mario spins. A simple thing but such a great marriage of action and response that it feels good and it wouldn't be as rewarding with a button press. That's important because you spin a lot and the coolest thing is using the star cannons, step into the star, shake and you're shot off through space at high speed.

It's not perfect, there are issues with the camera, collision detection and I can't believe how bad they messed up the fire-flower! Grr! But on the whole, it's such a charming game that lets you play around with gravity and the best platforming sequences in the history of man, that you can't stay mad. If you own a Wii, you must buy this game, if you don't have a Wii, you must buy one and this game.

All the fun I had with this made me wish for the future when we could be doing this kind of shit in virtual reality. Imagine that! Jumping around little mini worlds, shooting through space like a comet. Fuck yes! Until then, Galaxy is as close as we'll get.

VERDICT: Stone Cold Masterpiece.

That's Lobstertainment

Life in the Memory Economy

All versions of the future you have read have been at least interesting, but on the whole incredibly inaccurate, because not one of them accounted for the phenomenon that is: The Memory Economy.

As we move further down the road toward total inhuman capitalism, even our memories and knowledge will be for sale. You will extract and on-sell your experience for precious, precious Euros.

Of principal importance in this market is the process of Memory Liquidation, the method by which your memories are drained from your mind and sold as a commodity to interested parties. Exactly who is interested depends on the type of memory concerned and in most cases there will be 2 or more potential buyers, which creates competition and increases profit potential.

Fig 1.1 below illustrates the most common transaction in this economy: movie memory sales.Fig 1.1 click to enlarge.

Of course, you as the Memory Holder would not make much money off the deal presumably only the price of the movie ticket, but at least you won't have to think about the adventures of Chuck and Larry anymore.

If a person fell on hard times and needed a larger sum of cash, they could go to a Memory Harvester and have their education liquidated and sold back to the university or a third party who wants your qualifications. This is a rather drastic move of course and a lot of people would likely lose their jobs after having it done, this would necessitate a premium payment to the Memory Holder. Though if you were in the mood to change careers it may seem like a lovely idea.

It goes without saying also that desperate has been celebrities would be involved in this economy. When Sally Fields starts getting email invitations from Dancing With The Stars, she may think about selling off that Oscar Win Memory.

Other applications:
Victims selling their rape experience to perverts
Dying politicians donating their memories to archival institutions
Nut/Gluten enthusiasts selling food memories to allergics
Anybody else got any suggestions?

Daddy said he was going for chocolate and he never came back...

It struck me only minutes ago, that people at my age have children. There I was in the petrol station buying chocolate at 9:15pm while my children wait for me at home in a parallel universe. The sad thing is I'll never come back...

So I suddenly had this feeling that everyone knew I was a father, and the guy who served me thought I was buying the chocolate for my kids. That put a whole new spin on my perspective, what kind of father would I be? Would I be crushed under the weight of the responsibility? I felt for a moment like I'd stepped into the shoes of a different self...a tired father who worked hard, had commitments and wasn't incredibly selfish and indulgent, this happens to me from time to time, I wonder how things would turn out if someone else had control of my brain and body, somebody who got things done and didn't waste their life.

Now I'm going to eat the chocolate and watch telly...