Comically content.

Your forgiveness I implore, but I’ll be posting something a little off topic. This is actually intended for the UnrealEd Blog on my portfolio; Alas, it’s currently down. I’m digitally jotting here whilst I have it in my head.

It’s no secret I like computer games. What I like however is my generation of computer games. My first proper experience, my first owned console with my own money was the Nintendo 64. I had a Gameboy too, I did truly grow up the Nintendo fanboy. Like most fans of the ‘Big N’, I owned a copy of Goldeneye. This for me, was an excellent reason to be awake at five am on a Sunday, playing all the way through to nine am (at which point a break is needed to watch Power Rangers somewhat religiously), and onwards to ten am, at which point I would be dragged from my beloved console to attend Church.

I loved that game. I still do. It is one of my top games; not because it’s amazing. It was amazing, but in relation to today’s games, it’s winning factor is nostalgia. Anyone who owned a copy of that game, and genuinely enjoyed it knew the levels back to front, including the popular ‘Facility‘ level. It was my favourite too.

Another favourite game, also of the shoot-em-up genre, is based on my favourite western graphic novel ‘XIII’. Besides loving the story, This was my first proper foray into cel shaded gaming, when every other game was made to look as realisitic as was technically possible. The soft, comic book graphics of XIII were a delightful change, and looked excellent to boot. It played like you were in a comic book, and I loved every minute of it. The ‘BOOM‘ effect never got boring.

There is reason to my rambling. For those unaware, XIII was built using the 2.0 incarnation of the Unreal engine. The bad thing about the Most recent UDK is that it is rebuilt heavily since those days, and does not recognise texture packs, static meshes, particle effects, and other assets from previous versions of the engine. I’m a happy bunny however, because I found an extractor for those previous packages, and I’m now able to rebuild the materials for use with the most recent version of the Unreal Engine. I’m not sure why, but mixing the cell shaded textures with the phong shaded meshes seems to create a new spirit of inspiration in me.

..and I fully intend to abuse this.

Get me out of this hell.

I need to get a job. I’m sick of the job centre. Don’t get me wrong, It’s not the depression of unemployment. I’ve fully come to terms with the fact that I don’t have a job. What gets to me are the people I get mixed in with during the compulsory seminars. Every month or so, I attend a mandatory meeting where I sit down, and get told the best ways to find work. My most recent event was this morning. Sitting there, we do the whole “let’s pretend we’re a community” bit, by introducing ourselves, and explaining our previous employment.

Now, the only person besides myself, who looked even slightly respectable had worked in Television for the past 8 years and was actually telling a fairly interesting story. Within 2 minutes, this obnoxious, seemingly, hippy woman from New Zealand interrupted; “Oh I know exactly what that’s like, I’m a writer by trade you see, I started as a copywriter, so I was always a high flyer”.. and she just wouldn’t say quiet.. She continued with “I’m an intellectual, you can tell by my voice, I’m articulate – I’m so over-experienced, I want something boring so I can focus my creative energy elsewhere. Recruitment agencies are scared by my CV.”

I don’t know if this woman was bullshitting or not, but her appearance sure as hell didn’t match her story – never seen a more ropey looking hippy motherfucker in my life.

Seriously, if she’s been a hotshot for 20 years, then why the hell isn’t she using the countless contacts she must have made? Why does she look like she lives in the bins behind the local Lidl, and surely that kind of experience would teach you a bit of social etiquette like NOT TO INTERRUPT PEOPLE.

An Open Letter

Okay boys and girls, we need to have a serious talk.

I realise that in violent games, there is an element of smack talk that will be delivered. I understand that. You want to beat the living crap out of your opponent, whether it involves a single sniper round, a knife to the back of the head, or a helicopter raining down hot lead over anything that moves.

Please however, keep your trash talking in context. To make it easy for you, I have made some example lists for you:

Good

“Did you enjoy that lead supper?”

“Come shoot me again, I’ll kill you again”

“You couldn’t own a shack in Afghanistan” (Courtesy of Smithy)

Bad

“I’m gonna fuck you up, cracka!” (Even worse when uttered by white prepubescents)

“You just got murked!”

“OMFG YOU JUST GOT PWNED”.

Please note the differences. The first list is comprised of swift lines, which, when delivered properly will add insult to injury. The latter list, makes you sound like morons. You cannot sound hard when your voice registers as Soprano-pitched, and by using outdated ‘gangsta’ or ‘ghetto’ terms, you really aren’t helping yourself. The best taunt is killing someone again and again, instead of angsty lines that will result in the rest of your team mocking you.

Whilst on the topic of team based mockery, please stop complaining when you die. Once is fair enough, if it was a particularly cheap kill; a grenade launcher for example. Complaining about every death makes you sound like not only a bad loser, but also a bad player – you’re announcing your lack of skill every time you complain, regardless of the methods involved. So what if a sniper camped you? Pinning people down with supressing fire is often a tactical play – they’re hardly going to be charging in all guns blazing. Quit. Your. Bitching. It’s embarassing you, its embarassing your team mates, and its not like your enemy can even hear you.

D’awwwwww

I hug my pillow at night. That is all.

Day 8,117 inside Adam’s head, and Adam has realised he doesn’t actually have a diary room.

I’ve been alive approximately 200,000 hours. I say ‘approximately’. It’s actually closer to 194,894 hours. I know. I did the maths (and by ‘the maths’ I mean I used the internet to figure it out).  It would appear that I have, to use the expansive term, ‘lost it’. One assumes ‘it’ refers to my sanity, or by more popular standards, my marbles.

I collect things. This seems perfectly normal and natural. A lot of humans do. It’s part of our psychological build. We horde items, hold onto them, pretend we use them, then sell them for a fraction of the price of which we purchased them. More recently, the items I have acquired do not appear to be of sentimental, nay, even useful value. They can however, be put neatly on three (maybe five) lists:

▲ Equipment that I would need to break into a government building

▲ Items the police would confiscate if they ever searched my room

▲ Things my Father would disown me for if he knew I owned them.

I’d be lying if I expressed that the last list wasn’t funny to me. I think it’s become less of a list, more of a challenge – If anyone happens to own a copy of the Communist Manifesto (I’m looking at you, Huseyin!), please get in touch. I would like to put it next to ‘The God Delusion’, ‘Mein Kampf’, ‘Dianetics’, and the Holy Qur’an on my bookshelf; I’m hoping the result is a both a fear and confusion, with a large, if not stereotypical concern for my reading habits. Or, in simplistic terms, ‘one hell of a mindfuck’.

I should explain what warrants such a post. If you stopped reading after ‘break into a government building’, you probably don’t know who I am, nor the personality tag I’ve somehow acquired. If you stopped reading after ‘Mein Kampf’, I may have accidentally convinced somebody I’m a Nazi. Whilst I’m listing things I’m not, based on aforementioned reading material, I’m not a Communist, Scientologist, Nazi, Arrogant Athiest, or a Muslim; especially not an angry one.

I wouldn’t ordinarily differentiate between Muslims, but I was just browsing The Qur’an online, and immediately checked my bank account from the same page – I don’t want any authorities watching me to get the wrong idea.

I have however digressed somewhat; the point I am trying laboriously to get to is that you’re still reading, (despite several sentences that any normal person would have either closed the page and pretended they didn’t see it, or would have phone the Police) and that means you probably would like to know what my most recent acquisition of a curious nature has led to.

Night Vision Goggles.

Don’t ask. I’m not 100% sure either. Additionally, It would appear in the approach to 200 thousand hours of being alive, my sarcasm and pedant gene is healthy and throbbing. I’ve noticed an increase in what is considered the lowest form of wit. Needless to say my humorous bite is considerably worse than my bark, despite the popular paradigm.

For now I’ll leave you with an image of myself looking particularly (whats the popular term all the kids who wear four hats and carry knives use?) ‘murkage’.

‘The factors you highlighted are not commonly found together in graduate jobs’.

Good evening, one and all. This is another of those posts I wasn’t planning to make, but something has tickled me significantly enough to try and make sense of it in a tongue-in-cheek post about how life is crap and sarcasm is wonderful. For those of you playing catch up, I’m jobless, girlfriendless, bored shit-less, and some would argue humourless. That’s right, your wonderful narrator is looking for legal gainful employment (despite one of his favourite quotes: “That’s a thoroughly illegal, mad-cap scheme. I like it.” – Peter Firth).

Having studied a course which takes on both theoretical and practical aspects of many forms of media (it has ermerged coincidently, I live next door to Justin Krish, Industry editor; his work includes experience with films including ‘Nanny McPhee’, ‘Bride and Prejudice’ and ‘Bend it like Beckham’), I’m quite obviously going to be looking for a more creatively based job, or even a government funded course. So, I’ve signed myself up on the job centre website, the graduate careers service, and most recently ‘Prospects Planner’, a guide that helps you decide what kind of work you’d like, or be suited for.

I’m half way through, when I get a lovely little error message.

‘The factors highlighted below are not commonly found together in graduate jobs. You might want to consider changing how you rated one or both factors.’

That’s nice. It would seem I hate the audacity, the sheer brass neck, to decide two of many things I would like from a job: ‘Artistic creativity’ and ‘Financial reward’. Apparently they don’t go very well together. Similarly, Artistic creativity and ‘Stability and security’ in a job is also fairly difficult for the graduate program to manage. This will be interesting…

(First of what I’m sure will be many edits):

Prospects.ac.uk thinks I should be a furniture designer. When I said I like designing, and sitting on my arse, not quite what I had in mind.

(Edit number two!)

I went to the job centre today. I went to talk to an advisor, see if they could point me in the right direction for some courses – just something to do whilst I’m looking for work other than pissing about all day, and they said I need to sign on to Jobseekers allowance just to talk to an advisor. Such a crock of SHIT. On the plus side, looked at the prospects.ac.uk website, and based on my skills/motivations, I’d be ideal for being a junior developer/bug tester for games! SO! I’m gonna look at some london based producers, see if I can edge my way in with the gift of gab.

Additionally – It seems a lot of my posts are going to be rants about unemployment, I may make a mini blog for it, rather than spam up CS with my jobless shite.

‘Graduate Bachelor of the Arts, with Honours, in Contemporary Media Practice, Adam David Henderson’

So. Today was graduation. I actually finished my course over four months ago (and still unemployed, go me!), but the graduation ceremony with the big caps and silly hats was today. A day spent at the Barbican, for a ceremony where I get to dress up and look like a dork and shake the hand of a man I’ve never met, whilst a lady I’ve never met reads my name out in such a way it sounds like I was privately educated.

I realise I am cutting to the chase a little with my description of the day, but the actual highlight (besides being able to put ‘BA-Hons’ after my name on business cards) was the celebration after. Naturally, spent it in the pub with Lesbian friend Bex, Token Semi-Asian Alberto, and purely mental Martin, we drank until the not so early hours. Last trains, and whatnot.

I realise I’m being fairly brief about the drinking too. I’m still in the alcoholic state, so whilst my spelling is impeccible, my storytelling isn’t. Admittedly though, the focus of this post is not about the graduation, not about the drinking, but more the trip home.

The human brain is wonderful. Those who know me know I’m a logical pedant, and that I follow logic over instinct. Tonight, Instinct merged with logic in something that can only be described as magical. Tonight, my brain evolved. It became a drunken TomTom (should it not be an ‘AdamAdam’ actually?). Out of my local train station, I could hear in my head “In 100 yards, turn right”. I thought AdamAdam (I should patent it!) was taking me home. Oh no it wasn’t. AdamAdam was taking me to the chinese takeaway.

Not the good chinese. The okay chinese that I never go to. Yes, it’s cheaper than my favourite, but the food is starchy, and generally a little less flavoursome. Why is this good? AdamAdam knew I wouldn’t appreciate my usual in my near-paraletic state, and that the starch-bonus would absorb the alcohol, allowing me to not only walk home just that little bit straighter, but would allow me to sleep properly tonight without feeling a queasyness that would require me hugging the porcelain God. Drunken AdamAdam logic, you rock. I love you.

Side thought:

If I plugged an ethernet cable into my belly button, would I be able to download different voices for my internal GPS?

 

 

I am NOT getting a toothbrush moustache.

So, today I got… lets say, very inebriated. I still am, to a certain extent. In this moment of baileys/chardonnay stupor, my dear old mother (who detests the term and prefers ‘Mum’) showed me some pictures of my relatives. I’m 22. It’s only now that I am aware that my great, great grandmother must have, at some point, mated with Hitler and Bruce Willis. I am aware of course, the time issues in such an arrangement are incorrect; my alcohol-soaked brain realises this is quite impossible, without my ancestors being the owners of a time machine.

Its rare I swear. It’s incredibly rare. It needs to be said however:

My Great Grandfather does fucking look like he starred in Die Hard  Negative 1:  Return of the Chancellor

I’m just impressed this post is grammatically correct after so much vino. Night night all.

This way, you can listen to his voice when you’re lonely! (COMING SOON!)

Defender of the Queen’s English

I like English. I am a fan of the language, and every time some new neologism is formed that is a lazy way for people to express themselves, I die a little inside.

Imagine how I’ve been feeling with the past decade in music.

So many references to attempt to understand, so many malformed words, to the point where a whole subculture has spawned a language loosely based on English, but seemingly entirely alien. I am of course, referring to hip-hop. Before I fall into the trap of publicly shitting upon a subculture of music, I wish to make aware that it is in no part my intention. My only desire at the moment is to familiarise you with the fact that it exists. For without realisation, the next part of my post will not be at all humorous, and potentially a little dull.

My former English teacher, Mr Hanson, as scary as he was, made me remember one thing about studying the English language. “Adam, you need to make your point, present evidence to back it up, and explain your reasoning. And  put that bloody phone away!”.

Personally I thought that an English teacher starting a sentence with ‘and’ was considerably bad tradecraft. Regardless, I’ve made my point, now for my evidence. I could be incredibly cheap, and look up the lyrics to a Sean Paul song.

So I will.

‘Girls them a page me waan fi raise me, True me write nuff tune and drive them crazy’ is the first two lines of the second verse to ‘We be Burnin’. Argued it may be that Sean Paul uses Jamaican heritage in his songs, I don’t think that ‘waan fi’ is particularly Jamaican (If anything, it sounds like the two easiest words to pronounce in Welsh). Presuming ‘waan’ is a colloquialism for ‘want’, ‘fi’, I can only assume is ‘for’ (as used in other songs, notably ‘temperature’), and makes me sick to my stomach attempting to understand the man.

So I got to thinking. What if there were a way of translating these songs, without changing the lyrics at all, but to an easily understood dialect? This is where I pray you do stay with me, as I’m about to go off on a tangent. The sort of tangent I would blow one of three hypothetical wishes on.

Three people I consider to speak brilliantly articulate English are Mr Patrick Stewart, Mr Stephen Fry, and Sir Ian McKellen. It’s with this frame of thought I that I looked up other songs that I previously thought to contain ridiculous lyrics, and the three I short-listed are as follows:

3. Sean Paul – ‘We Be Burnin’

2. Ludacris – ‘Area Codes’

1. Mystikal – ‘Shake ya ass’

All relatively mainstream songs, these three I believe are the trifecta of accent based comedy. Nothing would amuse me more than to hear Sir Ian McKellen claiming to claiming to be a Pimp, or Patrick Stewart suggesting that he’s ‘got hoes in different area codes’.

My highlight however, is trying to imagine Mr Stephen Fry reciting ‘I came here with my dick in my hand,
Don’t make me leave here with my foot in yo’ ass; be cool! And don’t worry bout how I’m rippin this shit, when I’m flippin what I’m kickin nigga, that’s just what I do’

In the last instance, I sincerely hope Mr Fry would remove the ‘And’ from the second sentence, thus proving he is the walking essence of the Queen’s English.