The 30 Day Song Challenge - Day 6 - A song that reminds you of somewhere

This one is more of an artist as a whole, and again a bunch of artists could fall into the same catagory for the very same reason. The somewhere in question is the apartment my parents used to own in Portugal when I was very small. The reason is that they used to play these particular artists all the time as we didn't always being over too many CDs, and my parents, being the music loving people they are just played whatever they had. It is probably this that lead me to enjoy this sort of music, thus starting off my life long passion with the auditory arts. Out of these artists, including such greats as Bowie, B.B King, Iggy Pop, and Neil Young, I choose, for no particular reason, the chilled, the powerful, the legendary Lewis Allan "Lou" Reed.

Enjoy, bébé.

Read more

The Diary Of James (Acoustic Version)

Finally, my exams are over, well, at least until the summer exam season. Rather considerately a cold decided to hold off until they were over. I was in my last exam, physics, and I could feel my throat getting rougher. It was like the cold was peering over my shoulder as I discussed gravitational fields and capacitors whispering "I've played nice kid. I've been fair. Now it's time to pay your dues."

But I have created a concoction involving paracetamol crushed to a cocaine like consistency mixed into a warm squash drink, so I press on. Yeah, I have a cold, whatever. Exams are over, I think I did pretty well and that's damn a sweet feeling to have. Got started on the next physics unit already, and that's pretty awesome. But more to the point, it's good news for you pokemon fans. Already I am restarting my writing and planning of events to come. Some time at the start of February (after two of my players have done their psychology exams) sessions will restart, and that means more recordings, more laughs, and a new player! Excitement.

Anyway, hopefully with exams out the way updates will return as normal. Scratch that. Hopefully updates will maintain some semblence of consistency. That said, I've never maintained a blog this long without quitting, so that's a positive. Since this wasn't much of an update, per se, I suppose some kind of complimentary present is in order. So here's an old picture of me apparently looking like David Tennant.

Careful observers will see a guy in a yellow Star Trek uniform in the background.

Have a good week.

Read more

Stream of Consciousness

Why am I here? I don't know. I'm feeling down, and that usually means I'll try to write something, give up and leave it to the purgatory that is my blog's drafts page. Will this one go the same way? Probably.

I'm kind of stuck you see. There are things I want to say, but the people I want to say them to I can't trust with what I want to say, and the ones who I can trust don't have any relevance to what I want to say, making telling them about as helpful as keeping it all bottled up. I don't even have the returning reader count to feel like I'm telling people online things, because of the ridiculous restrictions I placed on myself at the start of this blog. If I break them then I feel like a hypocrite, and if not then I fail to see what can be achieved by this blog that can't be acheived by posting on Facebook.

Do I make a new blog? One I can pour my self indulgent rants into without fear of reprisal? Just keep this one as a posting place for my various non emotive activities? Certainly I like having somewhere to keep all my pokemon posts. That is something that is really special to me right now and I like pretending that I'm sharing it with the world.

But that won't work. you see, I am horribly objective. The moment I feel anything that seems like it might be negative I rationalise it and store it away. It's just automatic now. This often means that whenever I try to write something emotional, fiction or non, I can't. Especially non fiction which tends to be met with the thoughts "Everyone feels like this, you aren't special" or "This is just self righteous teenage BS". This is something of a stumbling block, for someone who a few non pokemon posts ago swore he would be something approaching the literary equivilant of the messiah.

Lots of things are happening in my mind and I can't sort them out without a good long period of self reflection or something, generally something I don't have time for. If everyone is feeling like this, then no wonder the teenage depression rate is so high. Everyone I meet seems to have had some trouble with it at some point or another. Or maybe that's just the crowd I'm drawn towards.

Look at these people. Bastions of misery, all.

Ah, here we go. The self righteous teenager thoughts return. "you haven't suffered" Well of course I fucking haven't. I'm a teenager from a relatively well off family, a family who are comparatively less fucked up than others I have known. Does that make my thoughts any less valid? "Yes." Well fuck you, me. "And no feeling sorry for yourself. You're not allowed to do that either."

I can't even feel guilty, lest I feel guilty for feeling guilty.

I have just noticed my continued use of the word teenager. I suppose that might be a problem. I have been kept back 2 years in order to redo my A Levels. I am stuck in the mindset of an A Level student when by rights I should have moved out a year and a half ago, to go to Godknowswhereingham University, learn the things I want to learn in an environment that will force me to work and think for myself. Then again I wouldn't have met some of the people I met in Bristol, and I honestly think that I am better off for having met them. This isn't sentimentalism. Objective, remember? The people in my old 6th form were so...How to explain it? Churchill was essentially isolated. There was no variety. It was all the same people, the same surroundings, the same convenience store/post office down the road. The same incestuous groups of friends that would end up fucking one another eventually, the same dramas between those friends replaying themselves over and over, becoming more predictable than an Eastenders storyline. The same underage serving pub where everyone met on occasion, and that worked for me. But when I fucked up there and went to CoBC, I realised how much more there was out there. I was the less-ignorant-than-most country boy coming to the big city. It was exciting. There were no boundries. No fence marking out the school boundries. No, this was a college, and I could go where I wanted. Hungry? No 6th form common room cafeteria and their paninis for you, no sir. I could go to Subway, I could go to cafes, I could go to god damned Tesco. Hell, it was an entire year before I even felt the desire to check out the college canteen. Bored? Screw trying to pry the network key from the incompetent IT guys, navigating the school network to get on the internet, before meeting an Orwellian filtering system. No, instead I offer you 3 words my friend:

This symbol was a beacon of hope in a dark and unforgiving world.

There are buildings and businesses devoted to serving you food and hot drinks, while letting you roam the internet to your unfiltered will.

And oh wow, the DRAMAZ. Churchill's isolation meant that any trouble was concentrated into this tiny area, and you simply couldn't escape. I broke up with a girl, and it took 2 weeks of spending my free time in the LRC before I felt comfortable enough going back into the common room, whereupon I would be glared at by teams of girls for a further 2-3 weeks. I know, I broke up with this lovely girl and obviously I was going to be the bad guy for a while. That's fine, you know, that's the formula that has persisted in teen society for years now. But I can't help but feel that if there was more dispersal, then the result would have been less intense. If there are more places to hang out, more different friend groups to hang out with until the heat dies down, then it's easier to handle that kind of thing. I was by no means the worst of it. The best analogy I can use is one of my favourite games, Dorf Fortress (Dwarf Fortress, to the layman). In this you lead a team of dorfs to create and populate a fortress. There is huge depth and such like that there is simply no space to put here. Basically, much like The Game (Oh, grow up), you can be winning, but you cannot win, and there are many many ways to lose. One of these is the dorfan tantrum spiral. The link leads to an example, but in short, something happens to make Dorf A unhappy, he tantrums, and kills Dorf B's cat. This pisses Dorf B off enough have a tantrum, who breaks Dorf C's stuff, who tantrums and punches Dorf D and Dorf A who had just finished his previous tantrum, and both tantrum, etc etc etc. This could be simulated, however in a much less lethal scale, in the Churchill 6th Form Common room. Person A pisses off Person B. In the city Person B could go cool off somewhere else, but in Churchill, there is nowhere else. So Person B is forced to get angrier and angrier until they do something in anger or retaliation, like sleep with someone's boyfriend, pissing of Person A and/or C. This is what I spent 2 years of my life trying to avoid, and one of many reasons why when Churchill is brought up around me I will darken in mood and grumble obsenities. I gained some great friends at Churchill, ones that I wish I talked to more, and hope they know how much they still mean to me. But there was a lot of shit at Churchill that looking back from this new perspective I don't want to get into, and really want to forget.

I have deviated from the main point somewhat, and I'm not sure I can find my way back. I'm not even sure there was a main point to begin with. This has been something of a stream-of-consciousness post that I think I shall put an end to here. I won't spellcheck. You can read it in it's original sleep deprived form. Maybe I'll put some pictures in. Please, do tell me if this is a posting style that you would like to see more of.

Night.

P.S. There shouldn't be anything in this post to offend anyone. If there is, it's probably just poor phrasing brought on by the fact that I am still awake at roughly 3 in the morning.

Read more

On Apple

A long long time ago (read: less than half a year ago) I was, what the kind and understanding people on /wg/ would call a macfag. Yes, I was one of those people you see in coffee shops, shiny white rectangle on their laps, typing thoughtfully away on NeoOffice in the hopes that some passing hipsterchick would think I was writing a novel and be so totally moved by my obvious charm and sophistication that she would instantly want to start making out with me and- etc etc etc, point is that I was one of those people. It was not long before that however, that I was much much worse. Before that I was one of those people who worshipped Apple. I was, I struggle to admit, an Apple fanboy.

 As with most things, I'll be fucked if I can remember exactly when it started. I do remember that my first experience of a mac was an old G3 PowerMac one of the friendly looking green ones before Apple had an identity crisis and went totally brushed-steel-Orwellian. I didn't like it. The interface was irritating, and I wasn't about to learn an entirely new operating system when I had my mums laptop. Then the laptop broke.

And so, already a child of the Internet, I needed some method of feeding my NeoPets and generally sucking at Runescape (I know, I know. I was young). So I ventured forth into the world of OS X.3. And no, not 10.3. That's what the fucking "X" in OS X stands for. Anyway. I quickly found that my initial misgivings about the OS were mistaken. It took a little getting used to, but I learnt to live without the right click, to have the 'x' button on the wrong side of the window. It was the kind of brief disorientation you get when driving in Europe for the first time. I would imagine. I learned the ways of the Mac, and grew to love it. Eventually I found myself with OS X.4, G4 PowerMac, and the original iPod Mini. Then one Christmas, my parents got me my old faithful companion, my G3 MacBook.

This white box of comparative power marked the climax of my fanaticism. While I had 'converted' a few others, I was the one known as The Mac Guy. And I loved it. I was spreading the good word. Microsoft was evil, and Apple were the valiant good guys, struggling against an unjust foe.

This almost happened, more than a few times.

At this point I had the two original PowerMacs, long since out of date, but still chugging long when I needed them, a G5 iPod, aka the iPod Video, and of course my dear MacBook. It was around this time I was learning about the incredible brevity of 'current' technology. I was aware that my MacBook was quickly becoming out of date. OS X.6 was a while off but I could see the anticipation. Now, those who know me may have picked up that I am definitely one to mentally anthropomorphize my electronics. You yourself may have picked up on it with the adjectives  I've already used. I felt sorry for my Macbook, but still I yearned for the newer models. I just couldn't get them. I was a poor 6th form student. I didn't have a job and I certainly wouldn't ask my parents for the money, out of a mixture of pride and knowledge that thousands of pounds was way to much to be asking of my parents. So I sat, actually happy with my MacBook. It was slowing down but it still served me faithfully, like an old dog, to old to go running with you, but still content with the leisurely walk down the street, only occasionally falling into heartbreakingly amusing seizures that it just gets up and walks away from (The metaphor still makes sense to me, don't worry).

And so I learnt another lesson of technology. Yes it is always changing, always advancing, but that doesn't mean you -need- all the advances. Not just yet anyway. I also got my first inkling of Apple's true nature. You see, before the MacBook, money hadn't actually ever changed hands for our Macs. We had been given them through some means or another (legally, I hasten to add). When I first realised the 800 odd £ price tag of even the cheapest Macbook, I vowed to look after it, to draw from it the entirety of its monetary worth and more. When they just kept getting more expensive, I was confused. I reasoned, they're small, they need the money. But a niggling thought insisted but they're not small. The iPod has launched them back up into the ranks. So I had my first doubt. But I was stalwart. Microsoft was the fucking devil and I would not succumb.

Things didn't get better. By now the iPhone had been released, and Apple were fucking dominating. Yet Apple continued to disappoint. My MacBook broke and they were charging fucktonnes plus the cost of a new hard drive to repair it. News came of Apple not being entirely scrupulous with their business dealings, or some shit. Bullshit lawsuits and problems with apps and stuff.

Long story short, I lost my faith. I still loved my little MacBook but its parents were douches. I vowed not to get the overpriced iPhone and iTouch (Which I will continue to call it just to piss people off), and looked upon people who did with a vague superiority. Apple have lost it's old message, becoming a money grabbing, slightly dictatorial monster with a humourous mask. You know, to make it "User Friendly".

Then I just didn't care.

Earlier this year I got a new laptop. I cost me £500 odd and has better specs that the cheapest Mac laptop. I gave my MacBook to my sister since it only really functioned properly anymore for what she needed, email, Facebook etc etc. I couldn't just get rid of it. It served me well for 3 years, give or take. When she gives up on it I'll likely ask for it back. Not because I love Apple but because it did serve me well.

I'm writing this now from the new laptop. Windows 7. It is, as has been said, what Windows Vista was meant to be. Again it got a little getting used to. And it works. It does for me what my MacBook did, and better. Obviously it will, it's newer. But I've used OS X.6 and it's not much different. It's full of features that, if you're going to use them, are great. But I won't use any of them. I need better music creation software than GarageBand supplies. I don't need iMovie, I don't need iPhoto, because there are better alternatives out there. I still use iTunes, but have found very worthy substitutes in Foobar2000 and Songbird. Most of Apples own products assume that you are an Apple Fanatic simply because you own a Mac, and want to fork out the money for a .mac account. Windows is an operating system, while OS X is a constant advertisement for itself.

Both do what you want them to do. They just have different approaches. I've used both, and even dabbled in SuSe, Ubuntu, and Mint. For now, for simple sheer ease of use, Windows 7 has my vote, though I may try and Dual Boot it with a Linux OS at some point. But somewhere along the way Apple lost me. They became what I used them to avoid and drove me back to something that, as it turned out, wasn't as bad as they said.

It occurs to me that much of this sounds like a religious awakening. In fact, the process does ring slightly of my transition from hardcore Christianity to Atheism. That's part of the problem. Technological fanaticism becomes like a religion. The two sides see the other as misguided, even evil, and neither will back down. Apple has taken this and even started adapting it into it's employees. The first page of "Job Opportunities" has in bold "Part career, part revolution". Revolution? Excuse me, when did a fucking electronics company reach the ranks of Che Guevara? Just because the same kind of people who parade your overpriced tech around also sport those exploitative Che T-Shirts everywhere does not qualify you to call yourselves fucking revolutionaries.

It's hard to remain neutral. Believe me, I tried. But look at what I've got to work with. Again, I'm not saying Microsoft or any other software company are blameless.  Linux fans can be just as fanatical. But when an employee assessment questionnaire starts asking questions like:

you have to start asking questions yourself.

I shall try to conclude. I like computers. I like the Internet. Any method that allows me to use them I will have a soft spot for. I just think that while all computer companies realise this, Apple are even more exploitative than most. It's not a question of good versus evil. Its just a question of choosing the lesser evil.

 Or just go ahead and choose the ultimate evil. You know, for kicks.

Read more