The past week has been good. Christmas Day was jovial enough, with a cracking lunch followed by the gift-giving. Hadn’t asked for anything special, only a small list of books and DVDs and whotnot, and all were received heartily. Boxing Day came and went without the feeling of anti-climax, for once, because I hadn’t been exciting about Christmas.

Yesterday evening I saw House of Flying Daggers, which was just as beautiful as Hero (though not with such a stylised colour palette) if not as well-paced and consistently engrossing. The ending suffered from lack of editing and repetition and (whisper it) the expected titular climax never came. But it was still a cut (or a slash; or a stab; etc) above the majority of major releases [4*].

Lots of small things have been going on in the meantime which I won’t bother referencing. I’ve seen a good few stunning films, read a comic (The Losers 2: Double Down - awesome [5*]) and met up with all my friends who are back from university. To jump right up to the present: when I was playing Halo 2 earlier I got 25 kills no deaths in le Pit de Rumble. It was a bloodbath.

And on that subject, this link - a video by Monto (?) of various Halo tricks, including a montage of terrific no-scope sniper shots, a load of grenade stickies, and some sword play. If you’ve got the bandwidth, have a look. (52mb, sound, good quality)

Okay, this evening was pretty enjoyable. Cinema is always good, and we ate the same Italian restaurant that we always do, Fiorentina in Berkhamstead, where the staff are always warm and friendly and the food arrives at just the right pace. I am now of good cheer. “Christmas” can go fuck itself, but in terms of having a nice winter celebration tomorrow I’m all for it.

Lemony Snickett was pretty awful though, with Carrey the only reason to stay til the end. The story was a tired rehash of Harry Potter (which I haven’t ever read, though get the sense it’s pretty damn similar) with some quasi-English/American setting, and a routine ‘adventure’ with various predictable set pieces. Pointless dialogue. Nice production design, though.

Update: it seems my IRC chums are also suffering from anti-Xmas fever.

As we were chatting (about the ‘a year in words’ cards parents always receive in December from distant friends), I decided to sum up my past year as succinctly as possible:

“mine would read: Did A-Levels. Passed. Played Xbox.”

Tis true. Alternatively I came up with this, my dream annual summary, translated into Haiku form by Digga:

robs in a dark cave
on his xbox playing stuff
happy as larry

It’s Christmas Eve, but I wish it wasn’t. This year I’ve gone so far past ‘not-feeling-Christmassy’, which is almost en vogue, and descended into ‘actually-really-not-enjoying-any-of-it’ mode. Hate to be a scrooge, but really, the whole season is a joke. Actually, Winter is a lovely season - nature is arguably at its most beautiful and there’s warm fires to light and curtains to be shut at four in the afternoon. I just hate this bloody parade of nonsense that is kicking off about now. Never really have before. The whizzbang hip-hip-hooray element, sure, that’s always irked me. The schmaltzy Christian angle too. But never before have I so loathed the gift-giving/receiving pagan-esque ritual.

I don’t know what’s happened. Probably a good thing. Logically (and I do cling to logic, as subjective as it sometimes is) there is nothing special about another year passing, there is no one person or god worth celebrating and there is something grotesquely cynical about this annual cavalcade of commerciality. But some part of me wishes I was a naive eight-year-old again. I guess that’s just part of growing up. In that sense I’m happy.

Seeing Lemony Snickett tonight, with family en masse (another irksome debacle). If I survive, posts will be made sometime soon.

To appease the nagging voice at the back of my cranium, some words. For the past few days - a week? Who knows - I’ve been wandering the lands of Rubi-Ka, enjoying Anarchy Online. It’s been a long time since I’ve played an MMO. I’ve never touched AO before, and all of a sudden here it is; I’m hooked. Now I understand the junkie’s dawn desire of a spoonful of crack cocaine, a little hit to start the day. I wake up, I log on, and I travel somewhere else - for hours. There is no need to be a part of reality when there’s a perfectly enticing virtual reality to immerse oneself in. Yet, always the intoxicating sense that becoming emboiled in something totally ficitional is self-destructive in the long run, though I can’t help but regret the fact that this is something I’ve been missing out on for years - being part of an online world proper.

Here is my diary of the past few days.

Day One

Crash landed on Rubi-Ka. Hunted various beach dwelling lifeforms solo and with my friend Chubb (aka Cfurious)[1-2]. Joined the Clan to rise up against Omni-Tek, and travelled to the city of Athen [3]. Met up with Blighter, whom I’d earlier chatted to on the island; he gave me a little monetary donation and warped out to battle evil somewhere else [4]. Down one of the back streets of West Athen I ran into Lynaera and her friend Chromium, two very powerful Agents [5-6]. I spent a long while chatting to Lyn, who was kind enough to suit me up in festive gear and also improve my finances, as well as offering lots of advice that I’d find useful in days to come [7-9].

Day Two

I spent several hours adventuring out in the wilderness with my friend Orbin (aka Glen), who’d just returned to Rubi-Ka after a long absence. We explored the regions surround Tir City, a total wasteland it has to be said. It was very eerie being the only two guys in miles and miles of desert.

Day Three

After a couple of hours spent fighting creatures in the Athen subway system [13], I helped a fellow Clan member, Sharille, find her way to Reet’s Retreat in West Stret Bank for the Xmas party. She’s the waif in the barely-there red dress [15]. Things were really kicking off, so I decided to throw some shapes. Soon everyone was at it. Like one too many similar escapades in the Real, I can’t remember much about what happened. But it was bluddy bwilliant, probably.

More soon.

Short of looking at the front page, I can’t recall the last time I blogged - which probably means it’s time to do so. I have a couple of things in the pipeline: several miscellaneous articles, adding a new section to this site for storage of said articles (and all the others), and blogging about yesterday. Yesterday was the day of the Lord of the Rings Marathon, and it was truly great. Predictably not as good as what I couldn’t help building it up to be (ie, an amalgum of all previous first-watches into one great mother-load), and utterly exhausting, but enjoyable the final beat nonetheless.

The following is something I wrote last week about Dungeon Keeper. I’m not sure how it rates as one blob of text, so as I type this I’m sating myself for the deluge of lambasting emails (as always).

Edit: This has been moved to the Articles section.

Edited my profile on metafilter and decide to answer one of the example questions above the About Me box: ‘why did you first get onto the Internet?’ This isn’t a complete or very articulate formation of my thoughts on the subject - I’ve been meaning to write a piece for, oh, several years, about the development of the internet, but it’s a vast subject growing ever faster by the day. Still, this came out alright.

Heh, “spill it”.

I first “logged on” to the “world wide web” in 1994, high off X-Files-fever and the delicious realisation that this was something new and almost undiscovered. My net-time was strictly limited due to exorbitant costs from fledgling ISPs, but I gradually became integrated into many communities apart from the X-Philes groups that seemed to dominate the interweb at that time, or at least all press about it.

Gopher was becoming passé. Usenet was great, truly a dominion of unspeakable weirdness, but great for it. Free speech reigned supreme. MSN Groups (part of the abortive ‘MSN Online’ ISP) was buzzing with people easily delighted at new things like e-mail and downloads. A particular highlight was the Comic Chat rooms that drew in people from all kinds of backgrounds to talk shit for all hours. And, yes, there were X-Files rooms there too. People wrote smileys like this :-) .

The Web proper, that is the w3, was almost barren by todays standards. For those who never experienced it, the most shocking anecdote seems to be that of typing a search into Altavista (once king of kings) and getting *no* results. Zippo! On the whole of the web! It indexed tens of thousands of pages, too, rather than the 8 billion or so Google tracks. And that’d happen for most searches, unless you hit a topic like The X-Files, or any other pop-culture item that was making it big. Or porn (which was in abundance, even back then, even if it was all a bit rubbish)

Nowadays you can type nearly any URL into your browser short of ones laced with misspelt words (and some of them too) and you’ll go *somewhere*. Back then it was more a type of game - the googlewhacking of yesteryear. I had a site, of course, for what it was - a grey page with large black text, and a few pictures that I’d stolen from somewhere else, a poem to Gillian Anderson (kidding); a few mumblings about this and that. A kind of blog. Nobody knew what to do with their web space. Nobody was ‘designing’ anything. This was the web.. and it was ours…but nobody knew what to do.

1996 was the year of Quake, that passed in a rush of heady deathmatch games and a new crowd of people arriving - gamers. Gamespy was merely a tool that you could use to find matches, they hadn’t yet consumed PlanetQuake - the mecca for people like me. Later years saw the arrival of more porn, and banner ads, and free-space providers like GeoCities, and pop-up ads, and Internet Explorer, and in the space of several years it’d lost its innocence and ‘cutting edge’ and changed. Possibly not for the better. Now it’s just as hard to say what you like online as it is offline…

*finishes spilling it*

Apologies.

[a proper piece, my Eminem review, follows this broadcast]

Have been meaning to post this since it was released, but I have no organisation. Anyway, now it sees the light of day.

Music review | Eminem - Encore [2004]

Between each of his albums, Eminem has advanced as an artist and matured as a human being. The skittish, brash toilet humour of his ‘99 debut, The Slim Shady LP (public debut - discounting the EP and Infinite) was replaced by brooding menace in his self-titled sequel released in September the following year. In The Eminem Show, released in 2002, Eminem had all but left aside true menace for cartoon-esque capers, with the launch single Without Me all but underlining his new intent: to parody himself and anyone who got in his way, alongside verbalising his ever-compelling life story. The album also marked a significant advance in rapping ability, with Mathers taking on lyrics that were hard-hitting attacks on specific issues as well as rapid-fire seek-and-destroy missions on electic targets-of-opportunity.

Whilst it may seem like a predictable cash-in on The Eminem Show en lui of its title and cover art (the often made assumption that it’s easy for the rapper to pen new lyrics around old ground) Marshall Mather’s fourth album proper is anything but. Where in the first two releases he focused on attack and destruction, developed here is The Eminem Show tactic of inciteful commentary. Those looking for controversy will find less than before, then, but this tempered aggression easily makes Encore his most mature and articulate musical offering yet, and put simply this is why true Eminem fans will hang on every multisyllabic cuss, joke and reminisce.

Short of a track-by-track rundown, I’ll mention a few of the stand-outs. It’s worth noting that the album is perfectly listenable from end to end, even though there are favourites which will inevitably get replayed along the way. One such track is the opener, Evil Seed. It’s not dissimilar to Cleaning Out My Closet in its references to his estranged mother (and all the other songs focusing on that issue), and for a minute you’re anxious that this is a retread over familiar ground. That assertion is quickly dealt with as Eminem unveils a startlingly new freeform style, the playground-style repetition of each line end instantly transporting us back to his childhood. So whilst the content is familiar, the performance is not, and this elevates the content above all previous efforts.

“Predominantly, predominantly, everything’s always predominantly
Predominantly white, predominantly black, but what about me
where does that leave me? Well I guess that I’m between predominantly
both of ‘em, I think if I hear that fuckin word again I’ma scream
– Evil Seed

Never Enough, Yellow Brick Road and Toy Soldiers cover Eminem’s past and present controversies, like Benzino and the Source tape - elloquent words over bittersweet melodies (the sampling of Martika’s Toy Soldiers could have been corny, but it serves up a suitably poingnant sound) but Mathers is careful not to exaggerate events or his own persona, and if there is one style at the core of Encore, then that is it - it’s a personal album with as little hubris as possible. It’s true that a large part of Eminem’s appeal was/is his larger-than-life characters - be it Shady or Mathers or Eminem - but it’s equally true that because of all the front fans never really got to hear the true voice. Whilst there is a lot of style and performance left on display in later tracks, the words seem picked for accuracy and effect as well as thrills.

“There used to be a time when, you could just say a rhyme and
wouldn’t have to worry about, one of your people dyin
But now it’s elevated, cause once you put someone’s kids in it
the shit gets escalated, it ain’t just words no more is it?”
– Like Toy Soldiers

Fastforward a little bit and there’s Rain Man, probably the funniest track committed to an album by Eminem, with a verse tackling the Christopher Reeves issue (apparently cursed due to Eminem’s behaviour waybackwhen), another that could be labled ‘What Does The Bible Say About Gay Sex?’, and a final scatter-gun verse that merges a lot more in-jokes in a suitably chaotic fashion. The chorus is a killer. Towards the end of the record we have another oddity Ass Like That a rap in the style of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog (a decent impression, too) for whatever reason.

“You find me offensive; I find you offensive for finding me offensive
Hence if I should draw out or line any fences; if so
to what extents if any should I go? Cause it’s getting expensive
Being on the other side of the courtroom on the defensive”
– Rain Man

There are a couple of tracks that dip below par like the D-12 track One Shot to Shot notable for the absence of MC Proof, and thus the 5-star merit is not entirely justified. And elsewhere, the revisionist feeling is stronger than others when the lyrical content is not able to dazzle - as in Puke. But for the tracks that do stick it, fans are gifted another compelling and enjoyable look into the life of one of the most talented rappers currently making music. All but the most harsh critics will forgive a little repetition when it’s as consistently entertaining as this.

****

[8mb .wmv file, right-click+save as]

A moment this morning spent fondly remembering Bullfrog’s magnum opus; a lazy afternoon spent doing nothing much in particular. The result: the intro video to Dungeon Keeper, ripped and edited for playback in 2004. No game FMV has made me grin so much, ever. Molyneux et al creating a last slice of brilliance under the Bullfrog banner. Sigh.

…the game runs in XP, too. No doubt I’ll be wasting several hundred hours more on it over the course of my life. Gillen made a remark in his recent Pirates review @ Eurogamer about Meier’s Civ and lifetimes lost to gaming, well I think Dungeon Keeper is my Civ in that respect. No idea how many times I’ve completed it. Hm, anyway..

Next step: NETWORK GAMES (though I barely ever got them to work back in ‘97…)

Apologies for it being a little dark - adjust your brightness + contast a smidgen.

www.findthetape.com

Are you a fan of no-nude pictures? Do the initials T.T. mean anything to you? Got a little excited recently? Would you like to see The Tape? Then spread the word!

Call me a hypocrite, but I’m not donating to some crazy scheme like this. I am a huge TT fan, but the likelihood is someone will lose their money. However it is TOTALLY worth watching that page just in case they have a result; you can guarantee, if indeed the guy gives out the tape to the people, that it will spread across the net within minutes. Possibly seconds.

Bookmark it. And cross yer fingers.