Alan Martin: The Lost Words

29

Fri, 17 May 2013 08:37:00 +0100

Today is my last day of being 28, and I’m sorry to say this means I have to accept something quite serious:

I’m not in my early 20s anymore. I may well be, I have to concede, in my MID 20s.

Being 28 was okay, it was a bit of a year of change for me really, where I got used to new things like paying a mortgage instead of rent, going on dates after the end of a long-term relationship, regular running, and - most recently - becoming self-sufficient on Fridays with Freelance writing. I’m still working on that last one: I think I’m just about ahead of where I need to be, but its been pretty uneven.

Anyway, I turn 29 tomorrow, but tomorrow isn’t my writing day, so here I am. I can’t say I’m expecting amazing things from the day itself (I didn’t try and arrange anything until a couple of days ago, and unsurprisingly people have plans at short notice, so I’m delaying until June), though that said I didn’t count on the spectacular generosity of Microsoft. As a loyal Xbox customer, who must have spent hundreds of pounds on them over the last five years felt compelled to send me a birthday 20 Microsoft Points.

To put that into perspective, you can get 117 Microsoft Points to the pound at the moment. Meaning they’ve given me credit to the value of… 17p. As my good friend Jamie pointed out, that’s like sending someone a birthday card with a 2p coin crudely taped to the inside. I’d like to go one step further and say it’s like that, only with insufficient postage, meaning a walk to the post-office and having to pay the difference. Well done Microsoft: you’re not invited to my birthday drinks. Take that, Bill!

I shall close with the only song I know about being 29: 29 by Ryan Adams.

Right, on with writing. Today I have two commissions to write, plus some other little bits and pieces. It is a GOOD freelance day: happy birthday to me!

Leftfield gaming moments #1: Championship Manager

Fri, 10 May 2013 20:02:31 +0100

Like most football fan gamers, I have lost many years of my life to Football Manager (nee Championship Manager), and while in my case it was definitely more luck than judgement, I had some reasonable success with it.

Anyway, I had two pseudonyms for any manager I created: Spup van Kipelrooy, a suave former Dutch international and, erm, Roger McTodger, my school in-joke Scottish alter-ego. Yes, yes I know: but it’s important to the story.

What I discovered - purely by accident - was that in those days the games couldn’t have never ending databases, and when it ran out of players it would use the manager name to auto generate some more. If your surname was Martin, that would go unnoticed, but when I did a search for ‘McTodger’… well, I wish I still had the screenshot of randomly generated players it did. Over 50 of them, all oddly Nigerian given I’d definitely put my nationality as Scottish.

I literally laughed out loud, and sent screenshots to friends. My eye was immediately drawn to one particular star: Nigeria international holding midfielder Lucky McTodger, who had 4 caps and 1 goal for his country, and available from VfL Wolfsburg for the bargain price of £1.5m.

I repeatedly tried to sign the young lad, much no doubt to the bemusement of the Wolfsburg manager, but it was to no avail: he couldn’t get a work permit, so he never pulled on the shirt of… whatever club I was managing at the time.

Anyway, I lost the screenshots when I switched PCs, and had forgotten about this whole escapade until last month, when I was browsing our site, and discovered the high-score holder of our latest game was one Lucky McTodger. I immediately knew who was responsible and dropped him an email: one of the guys who I sent the screenshot to still uses it as his alias on our site to this day… and he had no way of knowing I’d see it.

Too bad I never got to sign him from Wolfsburg. A holding midfielder with a 25% goal rate would have slotted in nicely.

On the Tories and their Ukip dilemma

Sun, 05 May 2013 13:28:00 +0100

As someone who routinely nerds out about politics, it would be remiss of me to not take a few minutes to write something about the local election results which non-biased Nigel Farage described as a ‘game changer’. Ukip averaged 25% of the vote, and took 140 council seats with local election leaflets that promised all kinds of things that are, um, beyond the scope of what councillors can actually do.

As someone who follows reporting from all sides of the political spectrum, I see quite a few calls from the right wing press urging The Conservatives to push rightwards to welcome back the Ukip lost sheep to the The Tory fold, and while I’d actually quite enjoy watching the British right fragment in the way the left did in the 80s, I’m going to offer some home truths now:

1) If you tack right, you lose the swing voters you need to win

It’s a balancing act, being a mainstream political party, which is why we’ve seen such triangulation between the three main parties for the last 20 years. Because of our First Past the Post System, voters have to pick the least unpleasant of their local choices likely to win, meaning that to stand the best chance, your mainstream party needs to be slightly to the left/right of their nearest opposition in order to soak up the most voters. It’s cynical, and I dislike it (which is why I was one of those folks who actually went out and voted for AV), but it’s the truth. There’s a brilliant blog post about that (and many other things) here, but here’s the pertinent extract:

Labour, of course, weren’t the only ones affected by their positional shift. As the party of power, they dragged the Lib Dems to the right too, because first-past-the-post politics essentially works like The Price Is Right – the most profitable spot to occupy is the one that’s the smallest possible discernible margin away from the other guy.

If someone’s guessed a price of £500 for a telly and you think the real price is £300, you don’t say £300 and risk his guess being closer than yours if the answer was (say) £405 – you say “£499” and to hell with the boos of the audience (read: your core support). The Lib Dems only needed to be a little to the left of Labour in order to try to capture their disgruntled voters, so they shuffled along to the right too, as close as they could get to New Labour (and therefore the Tories) without appearing to be identical.

Right wing Tories like to claim Cameron didn’t win the last election because he alienated people by being pro-green issues, soft on crime with his whole ‘hug a hoody’ rhetoric, and generally a bit more liberal. In reality, the fact he couldn’t beat a massively unpopular and tired looking Labour Party suggests that his modernisation agenda didn’t get far enough and he couldn’t quite scrub away ‘the nasty party’ image to absorb their disillusioned voters.

An In-Out EU referendum won’t fix that: counter intuitively, polling suggests that even Ukip voters don’t care that much about the EU.

2) A Ukip vote is often an anti-politics vote

Possibly as a reaction to the aforementioned triangulation, where the common wisdom is that all parties are the same (you could fit a tank between Foot and Thatcher’s idealogical differences, compared to the sliver of light between Blair and Cameron), lots of voters use local elections to flip the bird at Westminster.

“Ah, but its not been for Ukip before, so the tide must be turning!”

Well, no, not necessarily: historically, the Liberal Democrats have done pretty well at byelections and locally, being the party of opposition that was untainted by government policy. Now the Lib Dems have their hands properly dirty, they’re not getting the votes anymore (In the South Shields byelection, held the same day, they lost their deposit, finished behind the BNP and only just ahead of the Monster Raving Looney Party candidate). If you don’t like the look of Labour, who are you going to vote for that will likely show up well in the polls and look suitably protesty? Hello Ukip. Let’s not forget the tagline they used in the last General Election:

So for reasons 1 and 2, copying Ukip policies would be disastrous for the Tories, and would appeal to very few voters while alienating many. Moderate Tories and swing voters won’t like the change, while the anti-politics protest voters will be rightly cynical that they’re genuine. See the Republicans in the US reaching out to the Tea Party movement for the electoral cul-de-sac this heads towards.

3) Local elections aren’t the same as Westminster elections

The BBC has a piece on the history of mid-term local elections and what happened next. Interestingly, the Lib Dems attract around 25% of the vote in the locals before they entered government, which is exactly where Ukip landed. Now I’m not suggesting the Lib Dem voters all climbed on the Farage bandwagon, as we know that Ukip attracts votes from all parties, as well as non voters (though disproportionately from the Tories, I should add), but the point here is what happened next: No Lib Dem breakthrough at the election.

When it came to the vote, our rather undemocratic system meant that left leaning voters held their nose and voted Labour, rather than risking letting the Tories back in. Both Labour and the Tories have played off the fear that voting for a third party will see the others winning out in the past, and you can bet they’ll do it again (though personally I’m looking forward to any political canvaser who visits mine telling me that, because I’ll inform them they should have backed AV then. Hah.)

A 25% share of the vote, even assuming they could hold onto that which as we’ve seen above, protest parties seldom manage in Westminster elections would get them very few seats. A Rallings and Thrasher projection published today based on the local turnout got them a grand total of… zero seats, due to the First Past the Post system, and the reasonably even spread of Ukip supporters throughout the country (that is to say they don’t really have strongholds, as such). I actually suspect they will get between 1 and 5 seats at the 2015 election - I’m reasonably sure Farage will get elected with his new resident interviewee position on BBC current affairs programmes, provided he doesn’t make the mistake of standing against the Speaker again.

There is, however, a quite legitimate fear the Tories have that Ukip will eat into their support in key marginals, allowing Labour MPs to win in areas where combined Ukip and Conservative votes would outnumber them. That’s no reason to copy Ukip: all they’ll do is get a handful of ‘kippers back at the expense of horrified centre ground voters: essentially as Tony Blair (who, whatever you think of him, knew a fair bit about winning FPTP elections) insists: elections are won on the centre ground. Let’s overlook the fact that the British centre ground is actually in the centre right, because that’s not going to have changed by 2015. All the Tories need to do is resist the voices trying to appeal to Ukip voters (who in many cases aren’t voting for policy anyway) and go with a thoroughly negative campaign in 2015, depressing though it’ll be. Expect a whole load of ‘don’t let Labour back in by voting Ukip, back the side that can win’. It’ll work too, depressing as that is. The question is whether it’ll work enough to grant them a second term, but electoral mathematics states that’s more down to their policies and the economy than what the ‘fruitcakes’ next door are up to.

So as Andrew Rawnsley writes in today’s Observer:

The majority of Ukip voters tell pollsters that the Conservatives are their second-choice party. That gives Tories reasonable grounds to hope that many can be won back at a general election, when they will present the choice as a binary one between David Cameron and Ed Miliband. There is only one problem with this strategy. It requires the Tories to keep their heads and holding their nerve is something they find hard to do for two minutes, never mind two years

Relying on the Tory party staying united is possibly an even bolder strategy than trying to appease them, but it’s the only way I can see them being competitive in 2015.

A Wonderful, Stupid New Game

Thu, 02 May 2013 13:43:16 +0100

I have a new favourite game. A game I’m now playing all the time, at any point of the day or night. It doesn’t really have winners, or losers (other than, you may argue, the people playing) and its rules are inconsistent and nonsensical, but it has left me smiling from ear to ear every time a new update comes through.

It was devised as all the best games are (probably) in the pub last night, with two of my favourite people: Kaz and Ben. As children of the 80s, we bought and swapped Panini football stickers: growing up in Derby, I collected Everton for the simple reason that nobody else was, and it seemed a more attainable target than Man United and Liverpool. Good to know that even at that age, I was actively seeking out the path of least resistance.

Anyway, as such, our knowledge of obscure 90s footballers is pretty damned good, so this is where the game element came in. You think of an obscure 90s footballer, find his corresponding Panini sticker on Google Image Search and then send a picture message to the other players. Any time, day or night.

Extra points given for elaborate haircuts, and massive grins/scowls. Even more points if the other people can’t remember them, but the best reaction is “I’d forgotten he existed!”

Waking up to my text message history this morning, and seeing this was an absolute pleasure:

So yeah… if you got a text message from me last night with a former Premiership footballer in it: tag, you’re it! (Plus, y’know: sorry)

MUSICAL LOVE #3: Paul Simon's Graceland

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 20:04:00 +0100

The third part in my occasional series of musical indulgences is a bit of a weird one. Previously I’ve talked about the much maligned Barenaked Ladies and the largely ignored Magnetic Fields, but this time I’m going to concentrate on someone largely lauded as a musical genius. Worse, I’ll be the first to admit I know barely any of his songs.

The artist is Paul Simon. The album is Graceland.

People who know me well are often dazzled by the myriad black spots I have towards wide aspects of popular culture. Like the peculiar Henry in The Secret History (who turns out to be a bit of a psychopath, but don’t let that taint your judgement of me) there are bits of culture that have passed me by completely. Mainly in the area of film (I couldn’t tell you who a famous film star is from a picture, for example), but often in music too. So it’s not too uncommon to have a conversation with me that goes something like this:

“…like in SONG by artist.”

“I don’t think I know that.”

“You must do. It was huge a couple of years ago.”

Then it’s played for me, and people realise I’m not trying to be counter-culture, it’s just sometimes my ignorance can’t help flying its own little flag of dumb pride.

Anyway, this was one such example. I was dating a girl for a time late last year. I’ll call her ‘I’ not because she’s a symptom of a previously undiagnosed split personality disorder (although,that would be an incredible twist to this post!) but because that was her first initial. Anyway, on a date with ‘I’ round my house, she asked if anyone ever called me Al. I think my response was something flippant but dickish like “not more than once” - the subtext not being that I’d beat them up, but that I’d be a trifle miffed. Anyway, she commented that I should be happy to be namechecked in one of the greatest songs of all time. She was referring to ‘You Can Call Me Al’ by Paul Simon, which triggered the all too familiar reaction of my face being as blank as a quickly shaken Etch-a-Sketch. She played the song there and then, plugging her iPhone into my sound-dock (lamentably not a euphemism), and danced a bit to it (as I recall - my memory is quite sketchy, in part due to the two bottles of wine we’d got through at this point) and I remember being vaguely polite about it.

The next day at work, I listened to the whole of Graceland and… well, it blew me away. I fully accept that my listening to it so rapidly, hung over and sleep deprived (we got through another bottle and stayed up until 3 in the morning) was an attempt to ingratiate myself to ‘I’ a bit more, but I needn’t have worried about sincerity. There are so many superb tracks on that album, and the brilliant melding of folk and African rhythms throughout is nothing short of inspired.

I wasn’t just trying to appeal more though - no point, as she’d already made her disdain for my love of Morrissey pretty clear with a dismissive frown and wrinkled nose, and I wasn’t wild about her love of the Violent Femmes either (who incidentally sound a lot like The New York Dolls, whose UK Fan Club President was once a certain Stephen Patrick Morrissey… but I digress).

But anyway… Graceland. It’s at once an album that is understated and attention grabbing. It mixes world music with US folk in a way I haven’t heard as convincingly before or since (and I imagine it’s still pretty rare). It’s full of lyrics which are open, warm and personal, yet instantly identifiable:

She comes back to tell me she’s gone,

As if I didn’t know that,

As if I didn’t know my own bed,

As if I’d never noticed the way she brushed her hair from her forehead

It’s the kind of album where the silence is palpable after the strains of the final track fade away. I really miss that about CDs, by the way - the silence of contemplation at the end of an album. In these days of Spotify playlists, it tends to bounce onto the next album unless you’ve set it up in a way specifically to make things more awkward in the long run. Anyway, the antidote to the silence is to replay the album again: and bizarrely, it sounds as fresh on a repeat listen as it did on the first.

A wonderful conclusion to this post would be that I’m still seeing ‘I’, brought together by a mutual love of a folk album released when I was two years old (and she, come to think of it, wasn’t even born)… but that’s completely untrue. Sadly, the following date was comfortably one of the worst I’ve been on (there’s still time to top that, though: never say never!), and barring a frankly baffling text message conversation I never spoke to her again.

But I still listen to Graceland every few weeks, and if nothing else that wonderful little discovery meant that three week period of my life was entirely worthwhile. No hard feelings, ‘I’: thankyou for the gift of Graceland.

Let the great experiment begin!

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 23:02:00 +0100

Tomorrow’s the day! As I write this, I’m sat on the train back from an NUJ games event which seemed to spend an awful lot of time moaning that games writing is monumentally competitive, and rates have plummeted. So all sunshine, lollipops and rainbows then, as I take my small step into writing for pennies in areas that I know stuff about: games, tech and politics - at least to begin with.

But tomorrow! Tomorrow is when the hard graft begins, and I don’t have to make the half hour train journey to the 9th floor of my office for the first time. And what do I have lined up for tomorrow? Yes: making the half hour train journey to the 8TH floor of my office instead. World of difference that - aside from anything else, that takes all of 5 seconds off the commute (which may not sound like a lot, but scale it up over a year, and it’s LOADS).

Anyway, that’s just a one-off: rest assured this time next week I shall be sat in my house refusing to get dressed out of protest, as I fire off emails to editors who will already be fed up of seeing my name in their inbox.

One hour to go!

The Worst Thing About Twitter

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 13:40:00 +0100

Just a quick disclaimer here. I love Netflix - £5.99 per month is insanely good value, and it’s a great service - and I love Arrested Development, but this is the worst kind of irritating social media abuse and spam encouragement.

Taking advantage of people’s fandom of a niche television show is like shooting fish in a barrel (“I’ve seen every episode!” “I was watching it before it got cancelled!”). To be specific, a terrified puffer fish at full expansion with a shotgun in a barrel the size of a shot glass, so they’re having no trouble getting the retweets (up to 60+ since I screengrabbed), but pity the poor sods who have this stuff cropping up time and time again in their timeline (although I’d question whether the kind of person to retweet this garbage is worth following in the first place).

And the worst thing is that it clearly works, otherwise companies wouldn’t keep doing it. At least the whole ‘RETWEET TO WIN’ fad seems to have died out, thank God. “‘Like’ if…” on Facebook was bad enough in a kind of weird metric chasing nonsense approach, but at least that didn’t spam the chump’s friends as well with the advertising garbage.

Netflix, if you’re reading: I follow you to find out what new shows are coming to the service, and I love you for bringing back Arrested Development, I really do, but please: less of this annoyance marketing.

This grumpy blog update brought to you by a pretty tedious day. Hmph.

(And for what it’s worth, I have seen every episode, but no I’m not watching it again at the moment - too much other great stuff I haven’t seen…)

Preparing for Freelance in Pictures

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 11:39:02 +0100

Sometimes a picture is worth 1,000 words. In theory this makes hitting low wordcounts a doddle, though editors tend not to agree with that piece of common wisdom. Nonetheless, here are some pictures about my upcoming changes…

A little light reading to prepare for some pitches…

My office on Fridays going forwards. Not as glamorous as my current digs, but I could fill up that water bottle I guess…

This is absolutely what I won’t be spending Friday doing (unless somebody wants me to write a retrospective on Sensible Soccer… which I’m totally open to, by the way).

There you go, three pictures at 1,000 words each. That’ll be 3,000 words, so where should I send my invoice?

A small step into the unknown

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 18:32:00 +0100

You’re going to see a lot more of me on here from now on. I know that’s been an empty threat in the not so distant past, but it’s totally true this time. Actually I kind of hope it’s not, but realistically for the foreseeable future, it will be.

Well that’s a muddle of an opening sentence. Let me unpick it for you.

So, for reasons that I don’t want to go into here, I’m not likely to achieve my main career objectives at work. For that reason, I’ve decided to take matters into my own hands in a small way: I’ve dropped down to four days per week, sacrificing a fifth of my salary in the process. Today was my last Friday in the office: the last time I will board the 9:03 train from Tooting to Blackfriars on a Friday morning.

The plan is for freelance writing to recoup the loss in salary. “As things stand”, my logic goes “I make a couple of hundred per month on average from writing stuff, and that’s only using evenings and weekends - imagine the riches available if only I had more time to do it!” So, every Friday I’m going to be spending the entire day sat at home in a (let’s be optimistic here) dressing gown, industriously writing pitches, doing reviews and trying my hardest to take my career into my own hands. Things have been picking up since the new year, I’ve got a growing collection of credits from big publications (I’m possibly the only person in the history of the world sat in the middle of the venn diagram for People who’ve written for both The New Statesman and Nuts) and I get the impression that I’ve kind of reached the end of what I can achieve in just my freetime.

Why does that mean I’ll be writing here more, when AdSense tells me I have earned the princely sum of £4.73 from ads since starting my experiment a few years ago? Because I’ve already decided that my freelance day is going to be just like a regular work day, only without my headphones glued to my head like makeshift antennae. If I don’t have any paid writing to be getting on with, I’m going to be writing for myself (and you, reader: much love!) and making opportunities.

There’s loads of stuff I’ve wanted to write if only I had the time. Well now I have the time, the discipline to follow through with it, and not an excuse in sight. Lock up your spellcheckers, Alan’s going for it.

Further Thoughts on Welfare and Why Labour Can't Win On It

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 13:44:00 +0100

My miniature essay on unemployment benefits and why I’m happy to pay a fraction of my tax towards them got a lot of attention. Like, more than I expected when I haphazardly hammered the post out, so I wanted to follow it up with something a little more nuanced, based on recent developments since I wrote about it. Thankyou to everyone who shared it, friend and stranger alike: it’s wonderful to know that I’m not alone in my beliefs, no matter what the likes of Paul Dacre and Lynton Crosby would have you believe.

So I thought I’d said everything I needed to say in the last post: my personal feelings, with enough links in place that people could look at the raw stats themselves, should they want to. But since then, a psychopath in my home town has been jailed for the manslaughter of six of his children, The Daily Mail and The Tories have deliberately conflated his ‘benefits lifestyle’ with his criminal acts, and Labour has sort-of-announced their plans for welfare should they be elected in 2015. It’s more like they’ve dangled a few ideas out there to see if they’re looking severe and disapproving enough, and if The Telegraph don’t like it (which it looks like they don’t), they’ll try again. It’s entirely possible - likely even - that in order to look tough, Labour’s manifesto pledges on Welfare Reform will out-Tory the Tories. Guess what that’ll do? Yep, The Tories will out-Tory Labour, and the cycle will continue while Ukip grin smugly in the corner, watching the centre ground of British Politic edges ever closer to their batshit-crazy dystopia.

You can see the cogs have turned in Labour’s policy unit over how they can be simultaneously both more right wing and more left wing than the Tories on this, and they’ve come up with this unfortunate logic: People think welfare is too generous and rewards people who contribute nothing, so let’s make it so we reward those who have tangibly contributed something with more. I personally doubt this will work - it’s a poorly placed halfway house that won’t appeal to hardcore right wingers (“no benefits to anyone!”) while alienating the left leaning because it penalises those who need the most help. If you have contributed a lot in national insurance, then you have by definition earned more than somebody who hasn’t, so are in less need of the safety net. It inversely subsidises those who need it the least against those who need it the most, which is ironic considering how much fuss Labour has made about the cut to the 50p tax rate with a similar argument. This isn’t to say that those who have paid into the system don’t need supporting (they may not, though I’m sure there will be plenty of credit checks in place to stop abuses), but it stands to reason that those who have paid in little or no money will A) Need more, likely with no savings or saleable assets and B) Be worse placed in finding long term employment in a job market which continues to struggle. Whether you think the system works or not at the moment, it does at least take current circumstances as the main evidence for support, which makes sense, and it sounds like this plan will allow past contributions to overrule this, making tax paid less of a collective burden and more of a personal security plan… which isn’t really the point of taxation. Millionaires pay huge amounts towards the welfare state (in theory anyway), but rightly shouldn’t expect to get anything out of it, so why should middle earners be any different just because they’ve been fortunate enough to contribute more that those immediately below them?

So I think it’s pretty unfair and unlikely to win over the electorate, no matter what the polls say. Public opinion is definitely against the welfare state, as covered in the last blog, but elections aren’t decided on a single issue (as the Referendum Party and SNP have found in their own differing ways). There are some voters for whom being tough on welfare is the all important issue. Guess what? They’re voting Tory or Ukip. There are some voters for whom immigration is the only thing they care about. They’re voting Tory, Ukip or BNP. There are some people who believe all their Christmases would come at once if we were no longer ‘pushed around by Brussels’. They have Ukip membership cards. Labour has often tried to look tough on all of these, and it just can’t win - all it succeeds in doing is making the right-wing position look more natural: a centre ground actually fading off to the right. Is it really any wonder the public is broadly Eurosceptic, anti-immigration and anti-welfare when all the main parties and the majority of the media make talk about little else? There are people out there who without irony call Ed Milliband ‘Red Ed’, and view Labour as some kind of Socialist nightmare, when politically they’re quite entrenched on the right wing. Simply put, these people won’t ever believe The Labour Party is tough on welfare, because they don’t believe it’s possible for anyone to be tough enough on welfare. And they will never, ever vote Labour.

People have been moaning about welfare for as long as there has been a welfare state. 13 years of Labour government led to tougher checks and sanctions for benefit claimants than ever before (“The New Deal”), including the loss of automatic benefits for turning down paid work. The perceived wisdom though is that Labour were too soft with welfare and the unemployed, and that argument has set like concrete now despite it being demonstrably untrue (at least by way of comparison with what had been before). I worry that while this common wisdom about entitlement and benefit culture remains unchallenged, we’re in a race to the bottom where the safety net has so many holes in that it may as well not be there, if Labour’s tough right wing legacy is painted as a soft lefty free-for-all even by members of their own party who join in the kicking of the lowest paid, rather than challenging it.

I’m reminded of a line from Jeremy Hardy during one of his radio shows: “It’s come to the point now where the only difference between the two parties is that Labour think you should walk around the homeless, while the Tories think you should tread on them.”

But to end with a slight ray of optimism, for those that wish Ed Milliband’s bravery would match his rhetoric, there was an interesting piece in The New Statesman yesterday, following the death of Thatcher. I shall quote it directly:

“There remains a notable gap between the boldness of Miliband’s rhetoric and the relative timidity of his policy proposals. Reintroducing the 10p tax rate and requiring public sector contractors to pay the living wage will hardly have the transformative effect that Thatcher’s measures did. The ambition, however, is admirable. As Miliband’s advisers are fond of pointing out, the word “privatisation” does not appear in the 1979 Conservative manifesto. In time, they suggest, greater radicalism will come.”

The trouble is that Thatcher moved the centre ground with the help of the press. Miliband has a much bigger ask on his hands, assuming he even wants to. Still:

GAMES PLAYED IN 2013 #3: Hotline Miami

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 10:00:00 +0100

A New Year’s Resolution of mine is to write more. To help this along, I’m going to write some stuff about any game that grabs me enough to finish in 2013 - the only rule is that I won’t bother if I’m reviewing it elsewhere, because that would be wholly pointless. I’m also delighted to say, my last post encouraged at least one person to buy The Walking Dead - take a bow, Debbie.

There’s plenty of things I can say for myself with certainty: I will never enjoy camping; I find songs by The Ting Tings massively irritating; I will (probably) never play for Derby County. One certainty that was challenged with Hotline Miami was this little gem though:

I will never enjoy battering a man’s skull in with a brick, while wearing a rubber animal mask.

To be fair, this wasn’t one of life’s great ethical questions, and it’s seldom asked in polite conversation. But blasting all the way through Hotline Miami, the top down retro indie game in a few hours (it’s quite short) was a thoroughly enjoyable experience, busted skulls and all.

If you were to glance at screenshots, which you can do if you like above, you’d probably come to the conclusion that it’s a Grand Theft Auto clone. But not a 3D Grand Theft Auto clone, an old school top-down car thieving, hari-krishna running down, cartoony take on organized crime. It’s not really… well not entirely. It’s actually like a cross between original GTA and another Rockstar game: Manhunt.

Because it requires quite a lot of planning and stealth, and it constantly reminds you that even the best laid plans of mice and men can be derailed… especially if said plans involve smacking a guard to the floor with a door, grabbing his AK47 and blasting the remaining guards to the floor in a blaze of blood and glory. One shot kills, and the guards aren’t shy about taking that one shot.

On top of that, firing a gun makes noise, and noise attracts others from the building. Unlike the hand-holding modern games of the minute, where ducking behind cover for a moment will miraculously cure that punctured lung, or broken legs, if you’re hit in Hotline Miami, then you go back to the start. Fortunately rounds are pretty quick if you do everything right, which makes it like the trial and error of Super Meat Boy.

As fun as the gameplay is though, the thing that will stick with me about Hotline Miami (and I can actually prove this: I finished it in January, but have been lax at updating my little corner of the internet) is the end of each mission. Once everyone is wiped out, the hypnotic rave music and sound of bullets and death is suddenly cut out, and you calmly navigate your murderous psychopath back through the building, through the collection of corpses you left en-route. It’s pretty rare for a game to make you revisit your actions, and although it’s not a ‘what does it all mean’ moment, it does at least give you a few tranquil minutes to reflect on the nature of over-the-top videogame violence.

So I think on balance, I probably wouldn’t enjoy caving in a man’s skull with a brick. With or without an animal mask.

All The Fun of the Welfare

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 22:55:00 +0100

I’ve been reading the media coverage (both left and right) about welfare reform for some time without really commenting. But today’s intervention by George Osborne finally pushed me into belated action. The part of the speech that caught me was this little snippet:

“Now, those who defend the current benefit system are going to complain loudly. These vested interests always complain, with depressingly predictable outrage, about every change to a system which is failing.”

As if the Tory Party is without its own set of obvious ‘vested interests’, but I digress: here are my thoughts as one without any vested interests. I am not a member of the Labour Party, I have never voted Labour, I have never claimed Job Seeker’s Allowance or Housing Benefits and I don’t work in the public sector. I am unlikely, thanks entirely to good fortune I believe, to ever need to fall back on the welfare state for survival. And yet I think it is absolutely essential that the welfare state does survive.

That is down to one thing: empathy. I may not have the experience of living on a tiny amount of state handout, but I’m good enough at Maths (and that’s not really very good at all, by the way) to realise that £111.45 (Job Seekers Allowance at its absolute top end) per week isn’t very much to get by on. As I have no experience of this, you can get an excellent breakdown of how that money would get eaten up in no time elsewhere on the web. I actually believe that most politicians are privately aware that their rhetoric about ‘strivers vs skivers’ is a cartoon caricature of a problem that is massively overblown, but they don’t dare challenge it as being soft on welfare is political kryptonite. This is not an excuse: just because it’s political rather than intellectual cowardice doesn’t make a great deal of difference: it’s still cowardice, however you paint it. Ultimately, what’s the point in an opposition party if they don’t challenge the government’s implausible definitions? This probably goes a long way to revealing the reasoning behind my earlier statement that I have never voted Labour, but I digress again. You can read a brilliant response to the tired arguments against welfare here, rather than me regurgitating the same thing again.

Which brings me onto the recent petition to get Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary to put his money where his mouth is and live on just £53 per week, after he casually tossed off that he could do it if necessary. I signed it myself, but have been kind of questioning whether I should have done since, mainly because it risks trivialising the issue. It’s not so much that living on £53 for a week is impossible - I reckon I could have a stab at it, uncomfortable as it would be - but that doing it as a temporary stunt misunderstands the very nature of true grinding poverty, where it’s truly endless, and a sudden unexpected expense could ruin you. I could go on at great length here, but Alex Andreou in The New Statesman explains why much more articulately with genuine experience to back it up, so I shall leave that there. Since I started writing this piece, Duncan Smith has told his local constituency paper that the whole thing is a ‘complete stunt’ - he’s right, of course, but entirely wrong if he thinks that’s going to end the whole thing. Also, in saying that he’s been ‘on the breadline’ twice before (a claim that has come under some scrutiny already) kind of misses the point when he is in the process of cutting rates to levels comparatively lower than what they were when he used them, in a time when there are barely any jobs around, and his government is in the process of demonising people using the safety net as ‘scroungers’ (though not, to his credit, something that Duncan Smith does. According to a Telegraph blog post he was “absolutely livid” when he heard about a Tory poster campaign contrasting a nice family in work with a feral one on benefits).

But that’s an aside, really. Duncan-Smith’s most controversial moment so far has come through Workfare, a scheme encouraging people to work in return for their benefits to give them experience to get a job in the long run. Laudable on paper, but making it compulsory with sanctions for those that decline, and giving free labour to multi-million pounds like Tesco and Poundland is oddly counter-intuitive for a country so clearly desperate for growth. In my experience working in the media has taught me anything, it’s that free trumps paid for everything. I think most people would be in favour if the work was for not-for-profits, or local council projects for the good of the community, but it’s hard to sympathise with saving Tesco a few quid on their salary bill, that would then be taxable income for someone no longer drawing JSA. The whole benefits for work thing reminds me vaguely of Keynes’ not-to-be-taken-seriously idea that you could pay people to dig holes and fill them in again, rather than having them idle. It’s not the first time government rhetoric feels like it’s from a bygone age.

The government say that the welfare bill is enormous, and that’s kind of true, but the trouble is they’re deliberately vague about what’s covered under welfare, because people automatically assume this is mainly housing benefit and job seekers’ allowance: in other words ‘the scroungers’ in the cartoon rhetoric they choose to frame the debate in. This actually isn’t fair, as this handy tax calculator will explain. Simply pop in your earnings there, and it will break down your daily tax return. With my salary, I pay just over £11 per day to ‘helping others’, but just over 50p on unemployment and housing benefit. Old age is over half of that, but the elderly are rarely hammered by budgets because they tend to be the group most likely to get out and vote and the public are a lot more sympathetic to the elderly than the unemployed. If you put the maximum salary of £200,000 per year into the calculator, JSA and housing benefit comes in at just over a fiver a day: hardly generous, compared to the £46.83 old age care goes up to. Sadly it’s hard to imagine Labour hammering the Tories over benefits in the same way they did with ‘the granny tax’. Suffice it to say, a lot of the hostility towards social security comes from the misinformation about it, shown in the infographic at the top of the page, and expanded on in more detail here.

But even if you do object to paying a fraction of your taxes to the unemployed or underpaid (yep, as the graph at the top says only 3% of the welfare bill goes to the unemployed) the point about taxation is that you don’t get to pick and choose the bits you want to fund: it’s a social obligation. I put up with funding the monarchy (which went up £5,000,000 or 16% this year), nuclear technology and bank bailouts as part of the collective tax burden, and don’t particularly like it, but accept it as part of my social contract. Yet part of the rhetoric in the attack on social security is it being about getting value for the tax payer by getting the most out of those in the safety net. Odd: you don’t hear the government offering to launch our nukes when they’re expiring to get our money’s worth with a nice firework display.

Ultimately all this comes down to priorities. Don’t believe the argument that welfare is no longer affordable: it is if enough people deem it to be a priority, and it becomes politically expedient again (though support has dropped by half in the last 20 years). Personally my views on welfare can be summed up as follows: I’d rather we overspent and some people exploited the system, rather than we underspent and many genuinely needy people couldn’t survive. This doesn’t seem that radical an idea to me, so why won’t the opposition do the right thing and speak up convincingly for the most vulnerable, without needing to cover themselves with so many caveats that their support is essentially meaningless?

[CORRECTION 7/04/13: Someone with a great deal of knowledge about the workings of Job Centre Plus tells me that you can claim interview travel costs, so this wouldn’t come out of JSA. I have removed the suggestion that it would.]

Update: After the positive response to this piece, I wrote more about it here

MUSICAL LOVE PART 2: The Magnetic Fields

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 21:50:00 +0000

So, the last time I waxed lyrical/banged on about music was October 2012. It will be no surprise to anyone who acknowledges the cyclical nature of history that I didn’t make good my promise to write about more bands over the next few weeks, but I’m back now to talk about one that wasn’t even on my promised list: The Magnetic Fields.

Why? Well, because I’ve listened to pretty much nothing else for the last three days. And it’s not like this is a new enthusiasm - I first heard them during sixth form (which was… some years ago now), and own a copy of 69 Love Songs, their 3 disk concept album of short pithy songs about love: very experimental, and straddles styles like a bandy legged catalogue model. I’ve fallen for The Magnetic Fields all over again in a big way, which would probably make Stephin Merritt roll his eyes and give a droll aside given the cynacism and wit of the music. But it’s real Stephin: look, I bought my first band tee in 8 years for you:

Look! It has an owl on it! And yes, my hair is horribly unwashed because my boiler broke this morning and I only found out after I’d been for a run and… look, do you want to hear about my boiler, or do you want to learn about The Magnetic Fields? No, neither isn’t an option… look, shut up, I’m talking here.

So, The Magnetic Fields then. Clocking in at just under 3 hours, 69 Love Songs is quite hard to listen to in one go, but it does cross all kinds of genres over that time. There are two vocalists, Merritt himself who has an unconventional baratone, slightly camp voice which give the songs a certain dryness and gravity, as demonstrated on the wonderful Absolutely Cuckoo:

And for a comparitively small number of the songs, vocal duties are handled by Claudia Gonson. Take the lead track off of their latest album, a cheery number about hiring a hitman to kill an ex and his new partner:

So, what do I love so much about them? Well, in its simplest terms I love clever lyrics, soulful cello and nice harmonies and The Magnetic Fields tick every single one of those boxes. Sometimes all in the same song, like this one:

I also love the sheer diversity of the songs. Wikipedia tells me that on 69 Love Songs alone the band play the ukulele, banjo, accordion, cello, mandolin, flute, xylophone and marxophone alongside their usual guitar and synthasisers, which leads to unusual sounds such as this:

I think though, most of all I love the underlying simplicity of the music. When they’re at their most stripped back (With Whom to Dance, say), they offer something very basic, but very human and touching. There’s no good segway here, but I couldn’t finish this without posting my favourite of their songs (probably - it’s really tough to decide on just one): All My Little Words (cello, harmonies and lyrics, remember: I’m easy to entertain):

Anyway, they’re wonderful. If you have Spotify and want to find out exactly how wonderful, then here’s a handy playlist I made: Lovely Magnetic Fields

GAMES PLAYED IN 2013 #2: THE WALKING DEAD

Sun, 06 Jan 2013 16:07:22 +0000

The Walking Dead is the closest I’ve come to finding a Choose Your Own Adventure Story in two decades of videogaming. Unlike those kids’ books though, The Walking Dead is brilliantly written and actually pretty emotionally draining over the 5 episodes… two charges very rarely made of games.

What it adds to the mix on top of this is a real time sense of urgency. With a Choose Your Own Adventure book, you could read the set up as many times as you liked, and then slowly turn to the page you want, read the first line, go back and decide again if you felt like bending the rules a bit. In The Walking Dead, the action unfolds in front of you, and you have very limited time to make a choice - and usually the choice is between two pretty unsavoury options. The consequences have a lasting impact on the way your band of zombie survivors treats you in future.

Case in point: we come across a group of strangers out in the woods - everyone distrusts people in this game, given the undead walk the earth, and bandits are killing and stealing the scant resources. Anyway, one stranger’s foot is caught in a bear trap. After deciding these folks are probably trustworthy, and vowing to help the guy out of his beartrap shaped dilemma, one of our party spots zombies on the horizon. The game switches to the first person and I struggle with the bear trap. All I have is an axe at this point, so I try forcing it open. It resists. I try cutting the chain the to the trap, so at least the guy can be carried away. Still no luck. The zombies are getting closer now and time is running out, when suddenly I spot a third way… but I really don’t like it, so I try forcing the trap again. As the zombies get closer I realised there really is no alternative - amidst screams of protests from the unwilling patient I take the axe to his leg for some good old fashioned ‘no anaesthetic’ surgery. It’s pretty gruesome, and it doesn’t come off in one cut. I manage 3 swings of the axe before the zombies get too close and we have to leave - his leg is still attached… just. If I’d had the stomach to axe his leg sooner, he’d have escaped, as it was he was left to the zombies, all the while in great pain and bleeding profusely from the leg. I’d failed, and I felt awful. Genuinely awful.

I must have killed tens of thousands of virtual people in sprite form over the years - this one I’d known no longer than my other virtual victims, but it created real guilt. And that’s why The Walking Dead is special. It doesn’t really matter that your choices don’t make much difference to the overall story arc (the game is remarkably resilient at ensuring your actions don’t count for a great deal in the greater scheme of things. If a character is going to die, you might make them last a bit longer, but they’ll eventually snuff it - take that chaos theory!), it’s about telling a story and making you care about the diverse range of characters.

The zombies themselves are window dressing, really - necessary scenery for the bunch of diverse survivors to get thrown together, and get increasingly fraught with each other as time goes on. You can’t please everyone, and you may find characters treat yours completely differently in your version of the story - in my case, the most cathartic moment of the game was telling a guy named Kenny, who I had spent the entire game mollycoddling through tantrum after tantrum, to “go fuck himself” when he expressed doubt at helping me in the final chapter. Suffice it to say, he didn’t react well to this, and I knew full well I was jeapordising my chance of a less unhappy ending in this distinctly miserable story: I didn’t care. Or rather, I cared too much to let the game end without giving Kenny an earful of abuse.

Considering how little I care for most game stories, that’s a major feat. And as for the story itself… well, it’s not that it’s particularly novel, but it is wonderfully told, with plenty of surprises and cliffhangers, and it pulls at your heart strings in just the right way to make you care about the characters: in particular the little girl you’re charged with protecting for the game. I’m a sucker for a story with a lead achieving personal redemption, and my version of that character was just that: ostensibly a good person who had made some bad choices in life, but managed to redeem himself by the time the credits closed on the fifth and final episode - but not without a few regrets along the way, as the body count stacked up.

This is a game for non-gamers, because there’s actually not much game here, and the bits that are kind of get in the way of the story, and yet it’s still one of the best I’ve played in years. Buy it, and more of this kind of thing!

Games Played in 2013 #1: Resident Evil 4

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 23:24:00 +0000

So, my first of these: Resident Evil 4. Actually, that’s a slight lie - I completed it in December 2012, but it gives me a running start in any case. There are some games that everyone raves about and looks pityingly at you if you admit to never having tried them. While I still have that dishonour for any Zelda game, I can now get rid of the Resident Evil 4 zombie-monkey from my back.

And I must say, as is often the way when you pick up a game which is actually almost pushing retro now, first impressions were painful. Resident Evil 4 is 7 years old, and at times it really shows. Leon - the rugged protagonist with the suspiciously unmoving side parting and the charm-ectomy - moves with all the stilted grace of a zebra trying to moonwalk, and aiming a gun in front of you sees the targeting reticule darting round the screen, meaning you constantly need to twitch the analogue stick to shoot on target. And there’s more: the awkward menus, the weird handling, the fact that unlike every other modern game that puts a gun in your hand, it inexplicably puts the trigger on the face buttons rather than, y’know, the handily placed trigger at the top of the pad - they all add up to an inaccessible experience in 2013. And forget about multi-tasking: Leon will resolutely only do one thing at a time - moving and shooting simultaneously are completely beyond him (which is fair enough, I suppose - put an M16 in my hand, and I doubt I’d be doing pirouettes while shooting cans off a wall 100 feet away).

Which may sound like a meandering way of saying ‘this game is of its time, and shouldn’t be played fresh in 2013’, but I persevered based on the glowing praise of friends, and discovered a lot to like. Surprisingly, it’s the awkward feel which often leads to truly great moments: if the aiming reticule worked like every other game, taking out a bunch of slow-moving, shambling zombies would be child’s play. As it is, the inability to move and shoot causes you to waste a whole bunch of bullets over the 14 or so hours the game takes to complete, and they’re often hard to come by, forcing you to get up close and personal with a knife (which, true to form, Leon also handles with all the precision of a surgeon having checked out on his last day taking voluntary redundancy because of a crippling squeamishness to blood). It’s a tense games at times, as you get increasingly frantic with your shots as a group of zombies moves in, and all the more satisfying when your shots come off - through luck or skill. Memorable moments, aplenty.

The plot is so ludicrous it’s barely worth even mentioning - not so much a B movie as a D or E film. Something about rescuing the president’s daughter who has been captured by things which… well, they’re not quite zombies, but they may as well be, except sometimes their heads pop open with weird tentacle things. It’s full of cameo appearances from equally ridiculous characters, who I assume I would know all about if I’d played the previous games. They all talk in the kind of Hollywood film chatter you’d expect from someone who had only read about films in a magazine a couple of years ago and was trying to imitate the style from memory. After a heavy bout of amnesia.

But I could list all the games I’ve played with good plot and writing without even reaching double figures, so that’s forgiveable. Overall, it should be obvious that I quite enjoyed it, and it’s the first game to grab me until I finished it in quite a while. But I will end on this note:

When you spend half the game battling to make Leon move with any urgency at all, how on Earth does he pull this off in a cut-scene late on?

Bastard kept those moves quiet.

Goodbye 2012

Mon, 24 Dec 2012 20:50:55 +0000

My 28th year alive has proven to be an interesting one - on balance, for the most part pretty damned good, but as Aristotle said: ‘life is a rollercoaster, you’ve just got to ride it’ (or was that Ronan Keating? I always get those two luminaries confused.)

Anyway, as a year where quite a lot happened, I’m going to do the standard end of year quiz thing again. I’ve done this before on past blogs (and this one once), and they’ve always seemed a bit pointless, but it would be quite nice to have a real record of 2012, so here goes.

1. What did you do in 2012 that you’d never done before?

Gosh, all sorts: bought a house, made a police report (related to an attempted break in on said house), went on some proper grown up dates* (previous relationships had been the friends > girlfriend variety and I haven’t been single for 9 years, so…), got a sitcom script praised by a professional outsider, gave a horse a noogie, visited a Wild West film set, took up running seriously and probably a whole bunch of other things that temporarily escape me.

2. Did you keep your new years’ resolutions?

I’m not entirely sure I made any this time around, after a generally poor hit rate in the past. So I suppose by that token, yes: 100% successful.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?

Yep, two of my closest friends, now married to each other had a child. Pleased as I am for them, I must say for me personally I can’t imagine a worse way of spending 2012, but each to their own!

4. Did anyone close to you die?

I think 2012 was a death free year for me. Suck it Grim Spectre of Death!

5. What countries did you visit?

My entire year was pretty much spent between Derby, London and Majorca. One of those was a little less than the others, which you can probably guess.

6. What would you like to have in 2013 that you lacked in 2012?

More consistent freelance work would be a treat. Other than that, I think my needs were generally pretty well met this year.

7. What dates from 2010 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

Well, let’s see:

Friday 20th June - I got the keys to my house

Tuesday 31st July - The absolute low point of the year, but for reasons it would be unfair to go into here.

Wednesday 12th September - I get glowing professional feedback about a sitcom script I co-wrote, and the offer to recommend it to a major production company

That’s about it for specific dates - there are other ‘eras’ that are worth noting, but don’t have individual days tied to them.

8. What was your biggest achievement(s) of the year?

Losing 3 stone in 3 months has to be one of those I guess, as has the sitcom stuff, but that’s more the accumulation of years of work rather than a 2012 thing.

9. What was your biggest failure?

Probably not pushing even harder with the freelance stuff. A piece I wrote for Wired (this bad boy: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-08/03/prescott-punch) was originally pitched to a leading political publication, who didn’t have the budget but encouraged me to stay in touch - I pitched a couple more times, getting rebuffed with repeated encouragement to keep trying, but I ran out of steam and stopped pitching. If I’m serious about this, I need to keep pushing.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

Not this year, I don’t think, no!

11. What was the best thing you bought?

I guess you could say either my Note 2 or my iPad - both of which have paid for themselves in terms of the commissioned writing bits and pieces they resulted in…

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?

It’s become very obvious this year who my true friends are - who really has your back and who is more self-interested. My best friends have become even better, it’s fair to say.

13. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?

The inverse of the previous answer.

14. Where did most of your money go?

The house! The house and replacement sets of earphones, until I finally purchased my proper headphones.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?

Getting a house, various social events, some of the dates I went on…

16. What song will always remind you of 2012?

Morrissey - Why Don’t You Find Out For Yourself?

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:

a) happier or sadder? Happier

b) thinner or fatter? Much thiner

c) richer or poorer? Poorer because of the house, but with a higher income…

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?

Writing - here, there and everywhere. Only that makes it sound like I want to take up graffiti.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of?

Stewing about stuff beyond my control, ultimately.

20. How will you be spending Christmas?

With my family in Derby, same as every one of my 28 years to date!

21. Did you fall in love in 2012?

Bit premature, innit?

22. How many one-night stands?

Zero - not my style at all. Aside from it not really being in my DNA, I imagine I’d feel obliged to try and turn it into something it wasn’t out of loyalty, even if I couldn’t stand the other person.

So just as well it’s not in my DNA - that’s evolution for you (shush, scientists).

23. What was your favorite TV program?

Modern Family! Definitely the best TV discovery I made this year, and have converted at least 4 other people to date to its charms.

24. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?

I don’t really do hate.

25. What was the best book you read?

I’m kind of cheating here, because I can’t be certain it was this year rather than last, but I found The End of the Party by Andrew Rawnsley about New Labour from 2001 to 2010 absolutely fascinating. Brilliantly researched, and a fascinating insight into the personalities and frictions behind the scenes of government over the last decade. It was especially nice to see events described going from hazy memories to recent recollection as the book progressed towards the 2010 election. It even made me feel slightly better deposed towards Tony Blair thanks to the chapter on his efforts in Northern Ireland, where there was little to be gained in terms of vote wins.

If that’s interested you, the Kindle version has a free download to try. Amazon set this to be 5% of any book, but given this one is enormous you get a whopping 3 chapters…

26. What was your greatest musical discovery?

Warren Zevon, I think. Some would say that was a little bit of a late discovery, given he’s been dead for 9 years, but there we are. I’ve known a couple of his songs for years (I was first introduced to him on The Larry Sanders Show of all places)…

…but I listened to Excitable Boy on Spotify one day at work, and he rocketed up my Last.fm list - I just couldn’t get enough!

27. What did you want and get?

More regular freelance work, a house - there’s definitely a pattern forming to these answers, isn’t there?

28. What did you want and not get?

Not a great deal in truth. It would have been nice if the karmic wheel turned a bit more obviously from time to time, but that’s wishful thinking.

29. What was your favorite film of this year?

This is a difficult one, as I think I’ve only seen one 2012 film this year, and I didn’t think it was all that. Still, it wins by default: Silver Linings Playbook.

30. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?

I was 28, and I don’t really remember. Imagine it involved a meal somewhere though.

31. What was one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?

To have heard back with a positive about the sitcom - it’s amazing how quickly euphoria can fade, and it would be nice to get another hit from that particular aspect of my life.

32. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2012?

A couple of sizes smaller, and infinitely more fashionable (as somebody told me just last night that I looked fashionable for the first time in my life - ain’t that a turn up?)

33. What kept you sane?

Regular nights in the pub with various friends. A predisposition towards sanity.

34. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

I don’t really go for public figures generally, but I do quite like Clair in Modern Family.

35. What political issue stirred you the most?

All sorts, as a politics geek - from things that barely made a public ripple like House of Lords Reform to things blown out of all proportion like Gay Marriage.

As a brief aside, I really don’t see what the Tories gain from backing Gay Marriage - pleased as I am that they are - because all this modernising really does is bring out the more reactionary backbenchers in vocal numbers to remind the voting public that a party called ‘The Conservatives’ can by its very nature not be all that into modernising.

36. Who did you miss?

Well, I’d have liked to have seen more of my Derby friends, now scattered around the country, but I made an effort to see them as much as possible. As for anyone else, to be honest, if I’ve lost touch with people, it tends to be out of choice rather than happenstance.

37. Who was the best new person you met?

I’ll go with someone I’ve known online for years, but only met in the flesh for the first time this year - Ben. Now he’s moved from Liverpool to Reading, I intend to see a fair bit more of him in 2013.

I’ve met quite a few new people this year, and they’ve been universally lovely, so this was a tough one to give a definitive answer to.

38. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2012.

Sadly, there is such a thing as being too nice to people.

39. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year.

Turns out this is the same tune I used last time I did this, but it is something I can’t help but bear in mind with every year passed - useful to keep the sentiment in mind!

And if all you ever do with your life is photosynthesise, then you deserve every minute of your sleepless nights that you waste wondering when you’re gonna die.

- Frank Turner - Photosynthesis

* I was surprised to see how many people have asked me what the hell happens on an actual date - in my experience in involves a few pints and no acknowledgement that you’re on a date whatsoever. It’s entirely possible I’m doing it wrong, but every one led to a second date, so I can’t have been that clueless!

New Years Countdown #2

Sat, 22 Dec 2012 14:44:00 +0000

Well, it turns out that most the challenges mentioned in the previous post would either be too dull (shh!) or require too much redacting of personal information to be worthwhile, so not quite the extravaganza of content I promised.

Still, there was one more challenge that captured my imagination. The friends I do this with are my two co-writers on our sitcom script which I mentioned in a past post on here (no news on that at the moment, hopefully of the ‘no news is good news’ variety, rather than the ‘no news is just no news’ flavour), so when Jamie set the challenge of naming our 3 favourite sitcom characters of all times, it prompted some lively debate.

3 Favourite Sitcom Characters of All Time:

George Costanza (Seinfeld)

George (and to a lesser extent Mark from Peep Show) is a great creation because he’s thoroughly loathsome, but uniquely identifiable. He thinks in an appalling way, and yet one that’s only slightly removed from everyone. He’s completely likeable and hateable at the same time, but I think that’s almost completely down to Jason Alexander’s acting rather than the script. He became the character, even if in real life Larry David shares more of his traits.

Artie (The Larry Sanders Show)

Almost picked Hank ‘Hey Now’ Kingsley from that show – it had a strong trio of lead characters – but Artie just about nabs it thanks to Rip Torn’s excellent performance as the larger than life producer who keeps the show rolling with a mixture of charm and threats. He has some brilliant lines.

Here’s a ‘Best of Compilation’ of both Hank and Artie…

Geoff Murdoch (Coupling)

The fact that the show was so much poorer without him is testament to how much Geoff made Coupling special. I would have put most of that down to the lines, but then his replacement had some very ‘Geoff-like’ lines and they weren’t half as funny. His delivery was excellent, and few people can pull off the look of utter confusion/despair in the same way as Geoff – it’s a tough trick to pull off without seeming too wet, but he does it brilliantly.

Honourable mentions:

GOB Bluth (Arrested Development):

Damien Day (Drop the Dead Donkey):

Captain Hero (Drawn Together):

Jenna Maroney (30 Rock)

Joy Turner (My Name is Earl)

Francine Smith (American Dad)

New Years Count Down #1

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 13:45:32 +0000

2012 has been a weird old year. You’ll have to take my word for that because my words about it here haven’t been forthcoming too often. It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s just there’s SO MUCH to do and see.

Anyway, I’ve been counting down to Christmas in my usual festive style: an email chain with daily questions between myself and my friends - highpoints of the year, predictions for next and so on. As I have these already written in my email account, what better way of quashing the guilt of not posting here very often with no real intent to change in the long run? It’s very much a ‘throwing all your dirty clothes in the cupboard to tidy the room’ approach, but hey: it’s marginally better than nothing, right?

Right?

Sure it is! Provided I underline the caveat? Deal.

So, today’s challenge was from my good friend Jamie:

“You’re required, nay *mandated*, by the authorities to punch someone in the face. Who is it?

Following this unusual change of public policy, you are obliged by an act of parliament to give someone £100 of your own money. Who is it?

Finally, in a bizarre U-turn, you are required to pick an individual, and punch them in the face, then give them £100 of your own money. Who is it?

Go!”

My response:

Typical of this U-Turning government. Tsk.

Okay, this is going to be focused on what’s in the news RIGHT NOW.

So let’s start with a punch in the face to Google CEO Eric Schmidt (nice to have a surname that effectively does the cockney rhyming slang for you) who rather than doing the (slightly more) honourable thing and shuffling his feet embarrassedly over his company’s tax evasion has said (with only a little paraphrasingL): “Nope, I’m proud to keep as much profit as possible - y’know what? I’d keep more if I could!” (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/google-boss-im-very-proud-of-our-tax-avoidance-scheme-8411974.html)

I would give my £100 to Lego’s PR team, for this wonderful act of generosity: http://consumerist.com/2012/12/03/lego-finds-spare-discontinued-set-so-boy-who-saved-up-for-2-years-wouldnt-be-disappointed/

(If you don’t want to read the link, here’s the summary: A boy with Autism saves for over a year to buy his dream Lego set only to find it out of print, and going for loads more than he has on eBay. Writes to Lego asking if they have any in their office, they send him the set for his birthday.)

(That, or I’d take a leaf out of The Tax Evasion Handbook, and donate the £100 to Alan Martins Holdings in Belize, where I’d then pay it back to myself as a 2 year dividend. TAX EVASION IS FUN!)

For the final one, I will give Morrissey a firm punch in the face for his continual bizarre views and outspoken dickishness, but then neatly tuck two crisp £50 notes in his pocket, because nobody can quite craft comforting self-centred, morose-but-witty music the way he can. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/dec/12/morrissey-royal-family-nurse-death)

Musical Love Part 1

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 22:57:00 +0100

I’ve always been into music. Actually, that’s not true - I was very much a late bloomer to buying records, meaning my first buy wasn’t The Smurfs, or Mr Blobby but something marginally more fashionable like Travis - The Invisible Band or Muse - Showbiz. But somehow after a peak at university where my CD collection swelled to over 300 albums, I gradually lost my obsessive interest, switching to gaming, sitcoms and podcasts.

It’s coming back. In a big way. I put this down partly to me getting some enormous headphones. My earphones kept breaking - if I were to list my top 3 items of expenditure of the last few years, the list would read 1) Rent, 2) Food, 3) Sets of replacement earphones.

So, I bought some really chunky headphones. You know how cats have whiskers so they can test whether they’ll fit through tight gaps? I could do a similar test with my headphones now, so genetically I’m moving up in the world.

How chunky? This chunky, since you ask:

Why am I looking slightly to the right? Because this was taken on an iPad, and the screen is away from the camera part. I assume this is why catalogue models are always looking off into the middle distance.

Anyway, I’ve been listening to a lot of music lately. Obsessively you might say - I sit between the NME and Nuts stereos at work, with their very different styles of music, so like a child whose parents are arguing, I retreat into my own little world in my headphones. So I’m going to exuberantly talk about it here for literally tens of people to see.

There are a few bands I’ve been loving at the moment. I’m going to write up a few here. (To dodge future criticism: Yes, I’m aware music has been made since the 20th century, what’s your point?)

Barenaked Ladies

There’s loads of things I love about Barenaked Ladies, but let’s get the two things I hate out of the way first: 1) They have a stupid name which makes people dismiss them as a novelty act. 2) Their biggest hit was actually kind of a novelty.

It’s no wonder therefore that people hate them. HATE them. Hate them without listening to them of course, and it’s rather fashionable to trash them for no reason. And this is a shame, because as anyone who knows my musical tastes will tell you, I’m a sucker for any music which contains any of the following:

1) Clever, ambiguous lyrics

2) Vocal harmonies

3) Deep soulful cello

BNL pack the first two in spades. Very few manage all three in one go.

Their songs range from the fun and novelty (Another Postcard, for example, is about a stalker sending them hundreds of postcards with pictures of chimpanzees) to the dark and sinister (Tonight is the Night I Fell Asleep at the Wheel, which closes Maroon, their grown up album, is pretty self explanatory, but quite sweet in a morbid kind of way). Whatever they cover, they do it with a warmth and charm I just don’t see in many bands.

They dip into all kinds of musical styles, without any kind of awkwardness, from freestyle rap to alt-country, to a weird kind of central European big band style. Which makes the idea that they’re One Week all the more maddening - that’s just an example of them doing something different, not their definitive sound.

They also have heart, and (had) two very talented main vocalists. Stephen Page sings most the songs, and his rich voice is only matched by the heart he delivers the lines with. Ed Robertson, the other founder and vocalist is very talented too (look up his ‘bathroom sessions’ - acoustic songs performed in his bathroom, nothing more seedy), and I don’t buy the argument that they’re somehow bad without Stephen, but they’re certainly not the same. Here’s Page’s last ever live performance with them before leaving after his cocaine bust - it’s just beyond emotionally charged:

So in short: don’t just dismiss them as the novelty act that did One Week. They’re deep, fun, brilliant, soulful, smart, witty and heartbreaking. Sometimes all in the same song.

I wrote way more there than I intended to here, and it was definitely more meandering too. I’m going to do more of these, but as my past intentions with this blog haven’t always (well, ever) matched my actions, here’s some more artists I intend to cover: Warren Zevon, The Divine Comedy, James, Morrissey, Camper van Beethoven, The Jayhawks, Frank Turner. Listen to them all now, because they’re all fantastic. Or wait for me to tell you why, if you must.

All Change

Sat, 06 Oct 2012 20:55:00 +0100

It’s been a while. Actually, as I usually start posts with that, let’s just take it as read that I’m not as prolific at writing here as I once was, shall we?

Anyway, lots of changes have happened in my life since I last tumbl’d, so here’s an update:

Last time I wrote here I was waiting (in)patiently for the paperwork to be tided up, but as of 3 months ago, I am officially a home-owner. I finally understand many of those things that always seemed completely disinteresting to me before: wall colours, waiting in for carpet people and deciding whether or not to wall-mount a television set (I decided against, despite the fact that its position underneath two lamps, with a radiator below would make it look brilliant with a nose screen-saver).

The other more significant change is that I’m single for the first significant stretch of time in a decade. Don’t worry about me: I’m not at all cut up about it. The whole thing has been dragging on for a year or so, so it’s something of a relief to no longer have it on my mind.

I’m still at the same job: that’s a consistency I suppose, though it wouldn’t be wholly unexpected if that were the next domino to fall. The freelance writing is trucking along nicely too: While my Pocket Gamer time seems to have ended, my new consistent writing gigs pay significantly better and get me in print as well as online. In fact, in October alone I’ve made over half my freelance total for the last year, so thank you iPad & iPhone User and CNET. True, freelance accounted only for 3% of my total income last year, but moving in the right direction. “Mo’ money, mo’ problems” to quote Plato.

No, wait: Biggy Smalls.

More excitingly than anything else, a sitcom script I’ve been working on for a couple of years with my writing buddies Jamie and Ali has attracted some professional interest. That’s pretty huge - the report used phrases like “it is a BBC sitcom by the way” and “I expect to see it on TV or Radio in the next 4 years”. Pretty incredible - just need to make some minor changes before sending it back into the wild to sink or swim. Though given this brings one of my long-shot life ambitions a little closer, it really is surprising how quickly euphoria fades. Damned dopamine receptors, getting all greedy and stuff.

So: new house, new (lack of) relationship, and new writing opportunities. 2012 really is a year of change so far, and there’s still a few months left. How are you?