Smile!

Meet my friends:

: )     : (     : O       :S        -_-

These guys are some of the smileys i use most frequently. The question i put to you is, will there ever be (or is there already) a place for these smileys in the hearts of the grammarians.

Now it’s fair to say that smileys serve as a shortcut so we don’t have to turn our every IM into epic prose. If they’re ever to be recognised as a legitimate form of punctuation it will have to be demonstrated that it is more than just a lazy alternative to writing out a few more words. They’re going to have to genuinely add something to a sentence. Now clever old me, being clever (and old) has worked you all up into a frenzy of doubt and expectation. You’re asking, “but when, Luke? When will somebody prove that smileys count?!” But don’t worry, i’ll do it. In fact i even had the idea before i started writing this!

Now the first two smileys up there are pretty simple, they express basic happiness or displeasure. Arguably these sentiments could easily be included with a few extra words. Hence:

“I’ll be coming home soon! : )”
becomes
“I’m glad to be coming home soon!” or “I can’t wait to come home!”

and “I have to be back by ten : (” becomes “unfortunately, i have to be back by ten” or “I have to be back by ten, which sucks.” We might pause here to debate the grammatical merit of ’sucks’ but pausing is a habit reserved for people with too much time, (and people with Sky+) so onwards.

:S and : O are also pretty dismissable, easily replaced with a pointed “…” or an “i’m shocked to hear…” (incidentally i think that : O holds pretty much the same meaning as ‘OMG’)

This fellow is better -_- but is dangerously close to the crazy horizontal masterpiece faces used by kawaiidiots. See also @_@ ~_~ ^-^ \*^_^*/ and i think we can all agree that granting these any literary merit is a slippery slope to madness and social decay.

Well that’s it then, all my favourite smileys rejected. Never mind. Go home.

The End.

…?

Or is it?

dun-dun-duuuuun! Time to break out my thus far concealed favourite smiley of all! Here goes!…

: P <—-zomg!

I love that little guy. He truly expresses something that cannot be easily defined. Explaining his mystical meaning would be like trying to explain how the colour red actually looks, to someone who’s never seen it before. Maybe it can be done, but it’s certainly not going to be easy. Watch what happens when we try to compensate the sentence:

“Sounds like fun : P”
becomes:
“Sounds like fun… NOT!” or “I am being cheeky and toying with you here but not in an offensive or necessarily totally genuine way when i say that that sounds like fun.”

hmmm.. no dice. God knows how this smiley came into existence in the first place, have you ever made that face? Imagine if we stuck our tongues out to the side like that when we wanted to express the kind of gentle-but-maybe-a-little-sarcastic kind of sentiment which that smiley embodies:

“Hey man, going to that party tonight?!”
“Hell yeah! Party on down! Bleaearrrggh…“

I think you’d agree it would look a little odd. Furthermore i frequently find myself wishing it was ok to use this smiley in a formal typing situation. Consider this hypothetical email to one of my tutors:

“The essay is going well, i’ve been reading Lewis’ ‘On the Plurality of Worlds.’ It’s pretty tricky stuff.”
Compare with:
“The essay is going well, i’ve been reading Lewis’ ‘On the Plurality of Worlds.’ It’s pretty tricky stuff : P”

You can see how the first example could be interpreted as a rather deadpan cry for help, whereas really i’m shooting for a kind of ‘i’m reading it and it’s hard but not too hard, but i’m also not so arrogant to think it’s going to be easy for me’ kind of vibe. But that’s not an easy sentiment to express, especially in a concise email. My alternative would be something like:
“The essay is going well, i’ve been reading Lewis’ ‘On the Plurality of Worlds.’ That Lewis is one crazy cat lol!!”

I think that this guy : P basically serves as a mood-lightener. Pop him on the end if a sentence as you would a question mark, except instead of denoting a question you’re indicating that the sentence should be taken lightly. It’s a little mark to show that whatever you said, don’t take it too seriously. A disclaimer to say that you may or may not mean what you just wrote, and that everyone should just relax.

And everyone did. The End.

Note: I don’t usually have a space between the colon and the open brackets (or capital P, or S, or whatever) but i have to put one there to stop WordPress triggering its own dumb little graphics. If anyone knows a way to turn them off i’d be grateful.

Gaming in the near future Pt1

Apologies for the infrequent posts recently, i’ve had a lot on my plate with this troublesome degree i’m earning.

It’s easy to whine about the decline of video games, (which i still refuse to write as one word) and the general influx of casual game(r)s ruining what was once a beautiful and creative industry, with global gaming corporations turning a broad and varied art form into a mass of identical blockbusters designed to part increasingly wealthy preteens from their cash. (That opener may have accidentally revealed my bias) However i rarely see statistics to back up these claims. Therefore over the next few posts i’ll be looking at sales figures across the gaming landscape and trying to predict, using my mystical powers of reason, what they mean for the future of video games.

Nintendo DS – 10 million sales club.

Nintendo have attracted more criticism than any other company for pandering to the casual market. Nicole Kidman sits in a beautiful house training her brain – surely this is not the same company that made Donkey Kong?! The DS plays host to some amazing games (mostly third party) but how is this represented in the sales chart? Here are the 7 games which have sold over 10million each.

Nintendogs – well, it’s kind of a game i guess? Many of the early DS’s shipped with this, so i’m not sure if this one actually counts, sales-wise. Still, you can’t put a price on a virtual dog.

New Super Mario Bros. – excellent to see this on here, a brilliant 2D adventure, with every convention intact. If i was being sceptical (which i am) i’d point out that this was a launch title and was released before Nintendo saw the massive profits to be made from games which aren’t games, so it’s possible we wont be seeing another great game like this for a while…

Brain Age – Find an answer to the baffling question, “how old is your brain.” Now you can finally put paid to the myth that wisdom comes with age as you manically compete to have the youngest brain achievable. Fun app, not a game.

Pokemon Diamond/Pearl – well i guess somewhere there are kids still playing the DS then! Not that pokemon is exclusively for children, they’ve always been awesome games. However worth noting that the formula hasn’t really changed since red/blue back in 1999, as long as it still works i don’t know why Nintendo would do anything other than tweak.

Mario Kart DS – fantastic racing game, sublime controls and much less of the random element present in MKwii. (though i quite liked the unfairness!) still plagued by rubberband opponents (you overtake them and somehow they spring right back into the lead) but this game has passed many a car journey and for that i am grateful. Still, like Mario Bros. it was a launch title, leaving it up to interpretation how frequently we’ll actually be seeing games of this quality.

Brain Age 2 – pity the ignorant whelp who thinks he can get an accurate handle on the hypothetical age of his brain from Brain Age 1! Times have changed! Your brain-gauging technology is hopelessly obsolete!! Buy Brain Age 2!

Animal Crossing: Wild World – Interesting to see a life sim on this list, it’s a shame i don’t have any statistics on consumer satisfaction though, as i feel this was advertised as being something more than a mortgage simulator. Having said that this game has a dark streak a mile wide. Coming back to your house to find Tom Nook, the local land baron has extended your house without your permission and has left the hefty bill on your doorstep is always worth a chuckle.

This is a list of few surprises. Every title is from a Nintendo studio, and only half of them would qualify as games by many people’s standards. Seeing as how the iPhone does applications better than the DS, Nintendo had better man up and make some games, or they’ll find they’ve lost the one thing most valuable in this industry, the insane fanboy battalion; which Nintendo have dutifully pandered to for 20 long years. Days are passing when kids will buy anything with that big beautiful Nintendo Official Seal of Approval stamp, now the big N will have to start again with a whole new market. I predict a thousand cheap and easy Brain Age clones, and many more copy-pasted pokemon games.

Next time i’ll track down the best selling Xbox games, which should be a little more interesting.

edit: GTA: Chinatown Wars might change everything. (but probably wont)

Rockstar Drama

If game studios were people, and those people were your friends, you’d think long and hard about which ones to invite to your party. At this fantasy party Nintendo would be drinking a cocktail, holding a dozen conversations at once and generally being a young, healthy person, telling politically correct but very funny jokes. Capcom would be wearing a bandana and espousing the virtues of Thundercats to Sony, the sweaty uncomfortable nerd trying to act aloof. In a slick suit with a big false grin EA would be giving a toast, and Rockstar… well, Rockstar wouldn’t be invited. I imagine he has a handlebar moustache and big aviator shades, and has been known to get wasted, throw up everywhere and try his luck with the lovely Square Enix.

The past few weeks Rockstar have been causing drama, and not only in my insane imagination. On the contrary, they’ve been upsetting people left right and centre. Every upset revolves around the impending release (by the time you read this it’ll be out) of the first episode of downloadable content for Grand Theft Auto 4. Titled ‘The Lost and the Damned’ this expansion lets you control the motorcycle gang from the original game, and play through an all-new story based around their murderous exploits and curb-stomping adventures. Good news, right? Well sort of. The expansion is only available to download on Xbox 360, leaving Sony feeling a little cold. Microsoft reputedly paid 50 million dollars for exclusive rights to the game, and so yet again Sony are left empty handed, leaving PS3 owners feeling a little short changed.

To get a handle on this, consider Rockstar’s history with Sony. The Grand Theft Auto franchise has traditionally been at home on the Playstation, give or take the odd gameboy port. At the very least every game up until GTA4 was released to Sony before being ported to other platforms. Bringing the fourth instalment out on 360 and PS3 simultaneously was a move that garnered controversy from the Sony corner, and plunged the internet into a flamewar the likes of which had never been seen. (This mostly consisted of screenshot analysis to discover which platform would get a better draw distance and a higher-res textures) Apparently those Sony fanboys were right to be suspicious, as what was once a killer app for their platform has now sided with Microsoft. This is doubly frustrating for Sony as they pride themselves (quite rightly) on their online section. They have new DLC (downloadable content, make a note of it) for Little Big Planet every week, they don’t charge for demos, they have Playstation Home, and most importantly you pay for things in Euros, Pounds and Dollars, not ridiculous middle-man currencies like ‘Microsoft Points’ which can only be purchased in blocks of a hundred million.

People who like the GTA series are people who like Playstations. They’ve gone hand in hand for so long that if the Human Genome Project found the gene that coded for Playstation purchasing, they’d probably find it also coded for a love of sandbox mayhem and an affection for running over prostitutes. Sure, GTA4 on the Xbox will draw in legions of new fans, but this departure from Sony will be interpreted as a huge kick in the teeth to all those who followed the franchise from the very beginning, and even did something as crazy as buying a PS3 to try and keep up.

The Lost and the Damned will feature male full frontal nudity. This has not only upset all the usual outspoken pressure groups, but has offended the sensibilities of critics reviewing an early version of the expansion. It has been branded a cheap publicity stunt by some, whilst others claim it adds nothing to the gaming experience. (Obviously not quite true, it adds male nudity) The in-the-buff action is limited to one cutscene, which if you are so inclined, you can find on Youtube. (I would offer a link but the videos keep being taken down) For the less curious all you need know is that the Euphoria engine manages to control those tricky genital-physics with aplomb.

Lastly and most importantly Rockstar have upset me this week because ‘The Lost and the Damned’ still doesn’t feature any jetpacks. What on Earth is the point in a fully explorable sandbox world if I have no way of getting onto the roofs of skyscrapers?! This highlights a fundamental misunderstanding on Rockstar’s part, in thinking that the joy of the GTA games is watching your character go through a character building gritty adventure and come out the other end a little richer and wiser for the experience. Rather the joy of the GTA games is turning on all the cheats and flying a tank around the city, crushing hapless citizens by spawning hundreds more tanks in your wake. It’s taking a jetpack up to the top of the highest building, turning on the no-reload cheat and jumping off, using the rocket launcher to hilariously propel your corpse miles across town. It’s turning the gravity down and throwing people off the tops of mountains, then hijacking a jumbo jet to fly into them before they can hit the ground, and using spawn cheats to create a ramp made of cars on top of buildings that you can drive a motorbike off, bail in mid-air and land headfirst on a family enjoying a picnic in the park. In GTA4 none of these things were possible, and The Lost and the Damned does nothing to improve upon this relative lack of freedom. Rockstar, sort yourself out, stop upsetting everyone and maybe, just maybe, you’ll get invited to my murder-mystery cocktail evening.

Adsby earns a spot in my bad books

OK i know i’ve been hating on Google a little bit these last few days, and i promise this will be the last anti-Google rant. (at least for a little while.)

We’re all familiar with ‘Ads by Google,’ the advertising system that fills every page on the internet with junk that’s vaguely related to the topic of the page itself. Behold mortal, the power of context sensitive advertising. This advertising has recently infected youtube, as if youtube wasn’t infected enough. Now you can expect your videos to be interrupted by cheeky little Ads by Google poking their noses over the bottom of your video. Watching hilarious footage of the world’s biggest cookie? Expect an ad for cookie delivery to sidle its way over to you. “Hey man, looks like you’re enjoying seeing those cookies. You know, i could hook you up with some of those double choc-chip for a very reasonable fee.”

Everyone knows that people in general are suggestible idiots, but up until now it has been the task of advertising agencies to convince us that this is not the case. We are in fact attractive smart-minded citizens who work hard and carefully consider the value, ethical considerations and environmental impact of every purchase. It was a slimy, manipulative system but at least it made me feel good about myself. Now all i get is, “you watch cookie?! YOU BUY COOKIE?!”

A particularly insulting example of this happened to me just this morning. I was getting my geek on, enjoying the third Watchmen trailer in glorious Youtube HD (which actually works really well) when my old friend Adsby of Googleton shows up with the following message:

“ALWAYS HAVE BAD BREATH? SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN METHOD TO ELIMINATE BAD BREATH – fangocur.com/bad_breath”

Goddamn that’s a mood-breaker. But here’s the real kicker, this particular ad is what Google assumes will be relevant to me! I check the tags for the video, and find “geek” “nerd” and “comic book” amongst them. Well thanks a bunch Google! Good work identifying the geeks in the audience and singling them out with some insulting adverts. Bully for you.

Stupid Google. Initiate nerd-sulk.

Planning for G-day

You might have heard of planning for Z-day, the plan you make for when zombies inevitably rise up and come running (or lurching depending on which films frightened you the most) for you and your family. It’s important to make plans for nightmare scenarios, because when you’re safely established on top of the Mega-mart with a helicoptor landing pad, a sniper rifle and several years worth of ammunition and food you can be super smug towards all those hapless losers banging on the doors begging to be let in.

Google’s breaking-down a few days ago led me to create a G-day plan: a strategy for coping in the most disastrous, inconceivable circumstance whereby Google breaks or turns evil. Here then, is the rough draft of my plan.

Step 1. Drink some Red Bull. (or cheaper equivalent) You’re going to need your energy, soldier.

Step 2. Clear Firefox internet history – it’s riddled with broken Google stuff. If Google goes down, then so will Firefox, as I learned to my dismay. (see post below) Plus, if Google turns evil then your best bet is to quiickly erase all traces they might chase you up on. Having said that they’ll already have your physical and online address and know your search history, so maybe that’s a tad pointless.

Step 3. Open IE and delete your Gmail account, then open add/remove programs and remove google toolbar, Google earth and so on. If you’re using a Google OS or browser, I imagine you’ll have to manually dissassemble your computer, and if you’re using a Google PC, well, threre’s a lesson about eggs and baskets here for you.

Step 4. Set your homepage to ask.com. I know it sucks, but I think it has a peculiar charm. So there.

Step 5. Give yourself a pat on the back, and start making your ‘how to live without the internet’ plan. Also maybe watch Dexter. I love Dexter.

Star Wars and why Sony are better than you

My buddy Jon said it best; they should have just let Lucas make this, as it was clearly the film he wanted to make, and brought someone good in to make the new three episodes. But there you go, franchise murder is not an actual crime. (yet)

advertising trends.

Something getting real old real fast in the advertising world is adverts whose wow factor (god I hate that term) rests solely on the ‘they really did it you know’ principle. The Sony Bravia adverts with the plasticine rabbits? Brilliant! The age-old but still brilliant ‘cog’ ad – inspired. However, adverts of this ilk have convinced lazy executives that pouring money into an advert just so they can do something ‘for real’ is going to net them an audience and a viral video gold medal at the 2.0lympics. (pat on the back for coining that excellent phrase)

The lazy man’s ‘really doing it’ is stopmotion animation, which you might have noticed, is featured in every advert ever. It tries to be altogether too subtle – observe, dear audience, as we carefully and painstakingly manipulate this box/wall/traffic cone/wicker chimp until it appears to move as if by magic. If we can’t do it professionally enough, we’ll just throw in some crayon-drawn font and some sappy acoustic guitar music and suddenly it’s an indie-advert. Magic.

Conversely, Sony blew paint over whole apartment blocks, ruining them forever. That takes scale, money and a bold disregard for public safety. It says to me, “Hey, we’re Sony, and we don’t give a crap if you buy our TVs because, frankly, we can cover whole buildings with paint on a whim, and we can get a helicoptor team to film it, and we can win awards for doing so. Can you do that, pitiful human? Didn’t think so. Buy Sony.”

Another thing the TV is oversaturated with is adverts featuring music 50 years old, poorly recorded and sung in a funny voice, a throwback to a time when you could get away with composing a song about brushing your teeth, or choosing car insurance. Perhaps these composers of years past were wiser than we think. Maybe they knew one day people would pay through the nose to use their nonsense songs in trendy adverts and saw a way to secure a future for their grandchildren. Writing music sneakily intended for adverts shall be known as the ’song 2′ principle.

When is it the future then?

There are TVs on my train. They’re pretty small and the sound is tinny, but it’s pretty futuristic, or certainly would have seemed so to me when i was teeny-tiny. I can watch video on the move (video obviously top of the media hierarchy above music and photos, respectively second and third) and there are moving adverts on the walls. There are electric cars on the streets! Everyday things are touchscreen, like self-service checkouts or the self-posting (they don’t actually post themselves) machines in the post office, which they’ve put on the opposite side of the room from the service desks, so you can choose, like a puppy, who you love more.

All of this is pretty cool, especially the robots stealing human jobs, now THAT’S the future. But why doesn’t it feel quite like we’ve arrived yet? Aside from the obvious omission (hoverboards) what brilliant futuristic cliches are we missing?

1. Voice-controlled everything. Well, actually we have the technology for this, it’s just a terrible idea. So really, we’re super-futuristic, having been futuristic and rejected it.

2. Self-drying clothes. I assume the heating elements you’d have to fill your jumper with would be bulky and dangerous, but surely with a little more research this is within reach?

3. Anti-gravity. OK, i know this one is incredibly out there, but it’s a staple of science-fiction. Furthermore i would like an anti-gravity playpark, in a huge warehouse.

4. Teleporting. This one surely is feasible – just a reading of all my molecular data sent to the teleportation destination, where i am assembled again out of atoms they have knocking around. (Actually this one gives me the heebie-jeebies, because technically you’d die every time you teleported – but i might willingly die for faster travel.)

5. Stem-cell miracles/bionic limbs. Come ON people! i’m still young, and i want miracle live-forever organ replacement before i get too old. I’d be gutted if i was the last generation to get ever get old and die, let’s get a move on! As for bionic limbs, i think this plays to a deep desire in all of us to be able to punch through walls.

Have this issues rectified and get back to me.

MacBook Air

Today we will discuss the MacBook Air.

The best way in my opinion to judge a product is to look at its advertising. this tells us who wants one, and why – both very useful in assessing a product. Therefore let us travel by internet to the Apple website, more specifically, the MacBook Air page.

“Thinnovation.” Hm. Not a great start. Apple come under a lot of fire for making trendy but technically impotent laptops. How will they combat this criticism?

“MacBook Air is ultrathin, ultraportable, and ultra unlike anything else.”

well that’s a relief because my last laptop was actually frighteningly similar to other laptops – it had more than one USB socket for one thing, and a big ugly CD/DVD drive, not to mention two unwieldy hard-drives. In fact it had so many features it could easily have fatally pinned me under its massive weight as i sat typing in the park. The last thing i would see would be MacBook Air users playing frisbee with their laptops, and laughing with their beautiful wives.

Eagle-eyed readers will have guessed by now that this is not an unbiased review. The MacBook air really, really gets my proverbial goat. And here’s why; it’s the bare-faced implication that other laptop manufacturers are making their laptops thicker and heavier on purpose. As if the conversation at Dell headquarters goes something like this:

“Well sir we’ve managed to fit in all the features we think our customers need.”
“Good. now let’s stick on a few pounds of superfluous plastic and get this wagon rolling!”

Laptops aren’t fat and heavy because Sony think we could lose a few pounds lugging them around. It’s because they are full, packed, loaded with weighty computer parts! All the components, circuitry and wires that make your computer a machine capable of doing some damn computing. Apple (and you can’t hate them for it, they’re geniuses really) have spotted that if you take out all those heavy components and leave it with the bare minimum it needs to do some word processing and look at some pictures, then it’s a whole lot lighter! And people will pay through the nose for it! ($1,800 at the time of writing.)

Do yourselves a favour. Buy a great fat laptop capable of doing something other than typing up your big screenplay.

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We on the internet hate our comeuppance

Well, who’d have thought it would come to this.

The internet’s influence on the entertainment media is obviously huge, but never has it been felt in quite such a personal way as this. I am talking of course about the writers strike in LA. They want royalties from internet downloads, and they’re holding all our favourite shows to ransom. Now i’ve always taken the internet with a pinch of salt – there were no tears from me when Metallica killed Napster. But the prospect of no new 24, Prison Break or Family Guy in 2008 is a bitter, bitter pill to swallow.

I can see the logic – writers get nothing for download sales, which can’t be fair. Profits for these sales are pittance, but it’s about drawing a line. Five years down the line this is going to be big numbers, and unless they make a stand now they’re going to suffer later. On the other hand in ten years time we’ll all have worked out how to get our content online illegally and for free. If they’re striking over the legal stuff, who knows what’s going to go happen when it’s not only the studios but the consumers ripping them off?

This sucks. The internet used to be all fun and games, and now it might kill all my favourite shows! The internet led me to believe i could have it all – fast easy video and great programming whenever i wanted. Just another false prophet. This coupled with the TV-links fellow getting arrested, and there’s only one conclusion to be reached…

 The internet is serious business.

Radiohead sales figures come to light

In early October Radiohead released their latest album ‘In Rainbows’ online, with the added benefit to fans of being able to pay whatever they thought was reasonable for the download. Well initial stats are beginning to trickle in and the results are surprising. Wired report the average amount paid was somewhere between £2.50 and £4, whilst yahoo report 62% of purchasers chose to pay the minimum amount. I offer up two interpretations on my humble platter.

Interpretation 1:

The British public are penny pinching thieves who, granted anonymity would steal from their own children, and those who paid anything over the minimum did so only because Thom Yorke’s lazy eye makes them nervous.

Interpretation 2:

The figures reflect the fact that people are sick of paying as much as they have had to for music – especially the ones savvy enough to download it who will doubtless know how to get it for free elsewhere.

What do we think, O blogosphere?

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