The last time I was at this establishment I was a wreck. To say I was a shadow of my former self implies, in clichéd fashion, that there was a former self to be. I do not think I was anyone in those days, nor did I feel like I was anyone. I was not there. Now, I return, triumphantly it could be said, after a hiatus of two years, and I see mirrors of myself wandering the lichen laden concrete pathways. A lifestyle as hardy as the moss, that perpetuates despite increasingly tougher conditions.
After a two year break, following a near three year battle with mental illness, I am finally back at university. The completion of my studies, once a seemingly impossible dream, now seems ever more likely as, step by step, I somehow survive, even thrive, and grow more comfortable into the academic scene I left all those years ago as an anxious, panicked, depressive husk.
I was a slightly more mature student to begin with. Turning up with a spring in my step and a few years extra life experience over my colleagues. Now I feel like an old man, advanced only a couple of years in age, but decades in experience. But, back then, I could still have fun, I could socialise. Not out of any talent or necessity, but out of insecurity. I would drink not as a social exercise in fun, but out of an essential urge to be intoxicated. Alcoholism would have been a term I probably held in the back of my mind, but would pass over, merely claiming I was 'joining in' or 'enjoying the campus experience'. Of course, these lies are something most alcoholics tell themselves at some point. The hollow mental whisperings of denial that keep us on that easy path of never confronting the real issues, but simply masking them with the forgetful, heady airs, graces and feelings of booze.
I see, drifting among the towering stone structures, individuals finally cut free of their umbilical ties and whose first instinct seems to be to make noise, mess and their livers explode. Where once I would have joyfully joined, now I merely wince in pain and curse these people, not out of malice towards them, but out of projection. Out of a loathing not of them, but of me and the past that I consider such a mistake.
Do I envy their youth? Of course. Do I envy their lifestyle? Of course. Do I envy the freedom with which they can enjoy themselves free from the trappings of their own, ever mumbling, minds? Definitely. But at the same time I must accept we are different, them and I. We have different backgrounds, different experiences, different lives and different desires. I see their alcohol fueled social gatherings and their merriment and I feel slight envy, yes. I must also, though, reflect on the fact that I have had my time. It did not go well, and I wish I could have enjoyed it more. But I had my time to do what they are doing and now I must move on.
Now, instead of pondering when I shall have time to frequent the bar, I ponder when I shall have time to frequent the library. Instead of looking forward to meeting new people with whom to drink and make merry, I look forward to meeting new questions, new challenges, new areas of interest in my subject and hopefully those to share it with me.
My mind has been whirring away trying to work out what is a genuine insecurity. Am I now an old man? I stay in, I read, I chat to those important to me, I go to bed early, I wake up early, I cook good food, I eat healthily, I take care of myself - mostly in isolation. The kind of redundant tedium we would generally associate with middle age appears to be my lot at the moment. "Am I now an old man?" I ask myself. It has taken a while to come to a conclusion, but the answer is no. I am merely a much more experienced young one, with different needs to these youths who so immerse themselves in indulgence. I am here to indulge my mind, and enrich my life, not indulge my body and enlarge my liver.
Friday, 28 September 2012
Monday, 17 September 2012
The New iPhone 5 - 7 Changes That Will Blow Your Mind!
Well, it's FINALLY HERE! The latest and greatest from Apple's epic series of mobile telecommunication devices! Yes, people have queued, lined up, beaten each other to death, trampled each other, saw nothing wrong with this, and FINALLY get their hands on the greatest technological innovation since sliced bread and/or the iPhone 4! Forget the mass amounts of Chinese labourers working long hours for shit pay, because we are assured their conditions are 'improving' - maybe now that can take one two-minute break per eight years work and are allowed to visit a doctor if they feel like their life is as a redundant part of a production line...merely a cog in a huge industrial machine...and they are feeling suicidal WHO CARES!? Who cares about seven year old miners (minor miners!) on the African continent digging up rare ores and minerals to make circuitry so they can have enough money to not die for a week...THERE'S NO TIME FOR HUMANITY AND EMPATHY! THERE'S A NEW iPHONE AND I'VE GOT APPS AND SHIT TO DOWNLOAD!!!!
So here they are...The AMAZING tech innovations that Apple has blessed the world with like the benevolent Gods they are!
1) SAME APPROXIMATE SHAPE AS THE LAST ONE!
Now you don't have to worry that people won't think you have an iPhone! Apple really dropped the ball when they changed shape between iPhones 3 and 4 as many people couldn't recognise what it was! "Is that an iPhone? It doesn't look like one and appearance is EVERYTHING to me because I am shallow!" they would say! So, this time around Apple have kept the same basic shape! How fucking clever!
2) BIGGER SCREEN!
Yeah, Apple have GONE THERE! In an impressive move that has set the mobile telecommunications world into gasps of shock and jaw-droppery, Apple...HAVE MADE THE SCREEN BIGGER! Tired of having to look at things on a very small screen? Now, you just get a quite small screen! AMAZING! This is an unheard of move that nobody has ever done before. This new bigger screen has been redesigned to allow for a bit more eye-room, approximately half an inch, and is made of exactly the same stuff as the old screen! HOW INNOVATIVE! I've not seen so many people shit themselves at the sight of a slightly-bigger-screen so much since the launch of the Nintendo DSXL! (During which one man actually died of what medical professionals could only describe as delusion...) So, Apple! You have excelled yourselves! A bigger screen? How fucking clever!
3) NEW CONNECTOR!
Tired of that old, huge, 30-pin connector? Yeah, most companies were back in around 2008 and moved on to smaller ones...But Apple didn't! Like the great innovators they are! They waited...they waited a long time...they waited a disproportionate length of time during which they were happy to have such a difficult connection! But, that's only because they wanted to make sure they had the PERFECT connector! The new Lightning connector will be so much smaller you'll be left screaming "Where is that giant, cumbersome crevice in the base of my iPhone!?" Instead, you will now have a much smaller, arbitrarily different, proprietary connector...much like other phones have had for ages! But Apple's is better...because...APPLE! How fucking clever!
4) BETTER CAMERA!
Tired of having that shitty, old, 2004 tech, 5 Mega-pixel piece of junk with a terrible zoom? Now you can have a shitty, old, 2008 tech, 8 Mega-pixel piece of junk with a terrible zoom...IN HD!!!!! Yes, Apple have made the shitty cameras on their devices slightly less shitty, making sure you can take awful shots of things no one gives a fuck about and upload them to instagram in slightly less shitty quality! WHAT AN INNOVATION! Of course, we all know that 8 Mega-pixels is DEFINITELY better than 5 Mega-pixels, because 8 is a bigger number! And that's the end of that. How fucking clever!
5) THREE! COUNT THEM! THREE MICROPHONES!
Yes, I bet you're tired of your relatively decent call quality. Have you ever wanted a phone call with sound quality SO CLEAR it's like being with the other person!? WELL NOW that probably won't happen because I'm not sure if the tinny speakers can really do that BUT APPLE HAVE ADDED MORE FUCKING MICROPHONES! Yes, with two dedicated noise cancelling microphones, now Siri can hear you talk about how awesome you are because you have the new iPhone in even better quality...and not bring up search results for "How I know I'm a Dick..." by mistake after mishearing you. All that REALLY IMPORTANT stuff you say will sound even MORE IMPORTANT! Maybe...again, depends on the quality of the other speaker...HOW FUCKING CLEVER!
6) NEW TECHNOLOGY!
Did you think Apple were going to include the same old shit in their phone? Did you think they'd have the same RAM, processors and antennae technology? OF COURSE NOT SILLY! THIS IS APPLE! Or any other manufacturer bringing out a new product...Yes! Thanks to the AMAZING AND UNIQUE INNOVATION at Apple, they have taken lots of components that other people not affiliated with Apple have made better. They have also, counter to common sense (presumably) improved their custom chipset to make it EVEN BETTER! They have, since the iPhone 4 been working on it!...AND PUT THEM IN THE IPHONE! This is...just...SERIOUSLY MARVEL AT THE GENIUS INVENTION OF THE APPLE GENIUSES! How fucking clever.
7) LUDICROUS PRICETAG!
Apple knows you! Apple knows! Apple knows you don't want to buy a reasonably priced phone that fits your budget, doesn't bankrupt you and still performs well doing all that stuff you love...like calling, texting and playing Angry Birds! APPLE KNOWS YOU WANT TO BUY STATUS WITH MONEY YOU DON'T HAVE SO YOU CAN LOOK LIKE YOU HAVE MORE MONEY THAN YOU HAVE! They know you want a mobile phone contract that contains things you don't use, for a price well above the odds, as well as having to pay a little bit extra for the phone...Because obviously price = STATUS! The more you pay for it, the better a person you must be to have all that money. So they have given you 24 month contracts of £35-40 with a £50-100 charge for the phone...Just for you, so you know people won't think you're poor, even though you are and are even more so now because you just got the new iPhone! Apple also knows that as a result of the blacklisting of your name due to County Court Judgments due to not being able to pay your last phone contract, Apple knows some people can't have phone contracts any more and need pay as you go...SO APPLE WILL SELL YOU THE iPHONE 5 FOR A LUDICROUS PRICE ANYWAY! So people still won't think you're poor...Good ol' Apple, looking out for you. How fucking clever.
Mind, meet blown!
So here they are...The AMAZING tech innovations that Apple has blessed the world with like the benevolent Gods they are!
1) SAME APPROXIMATE SHAPE AS THE LAST ONE!
Now you don't have to worry that people won't think you have an iPhone! Apple really dropped the ball when they changed shape between iPhones 3 and 4 as many people couldn't recognise what it was! "Is that an iPhone? It doesn't look like one and appearance is EVERYTHING to me because I am shallow!" they would say! So, this time around Apple have kept the same basic shape! How fucking clever!
2) BIGGER SCREEN!
Yeah, Apple have GONE THERE! In an impressive move that has set the mobile telecommunications world into gasps of shock and jaw-droppery, Apple...HAVE MADE THE SCREEN BIGGER! Tired of having to look at things on a very small screen? Now, you just get a quite small screen! AMAZING! This is an unheard of move that nobody has ever done before. This new bigger screen has been redesigned to allow for a bit more eye-room, approximately half an inch, and is made of exactly the same stuff as the old screen! HOW INNOVATIVE! I've not seen so many people shit themselves at the sight of a slightly-bigger-screen so much since the launch of the Nintendo DSXL! (During which one man actually died of what medical professionals could only describe as delusion...) So, Apple! You have excelled yourselves! A bigger screen? How fucking clever!
3) NEW CONNECTOR!
Tired of that old, huge, 30-pin connector? Yeah, most companies were back in around 2008 and moved on to smaller ones...But Apple didn't! Like the great innovators they are! They waited...they waited a long time...they waited a disproportionate length of time during which they were happy to have such a difficult connection! But, that's only because they wanted to make sure they had the PERFECT connector! The new Lightning connector will be so much smaller you'll be left screaming "Where is that giant, cumbersome crevice in the base of my iPhone!?" Instead, you will now have a much smaller, arbitrarily different, proprietary connector...much like other phones have had for ages! But Apple's is better...because...APPLE! How fucking clever!
4) BETTER CAMERA!
Tired of having that shitty, old, 2004 tech, 5 Mega-pixel piece of junk with a terrible zoom? Now you can have a shitty, old, 2008 tech, 8 Mega-pixel piece of junk with a terrible zoom...IN HD!!!!! Yes, Apple have made the shitty cameras on their devices slightly less shitty, making sure you can take awful shots of things no one gives a fuck about and upload them to instagram in slightly less shitty quality! WHAT AN INNOVATION! Of course, we all know that 8 Mega-pixels is DEFINITELY better than 5 Mega-pixels, because 8 is a bigger number! And that's the end of that. How fucking clever!
5) THREE! COUNT THEM! THREE MICROPHONES!
Yes, I bet you're tired of your relatively decent call quality. Have you ever wanted a phone call with sound quality SO CLEAR it's like being with the other person!? WELL NOW that probably won't happen because I'm not sure if the tinny speakers can really do that BUT APPLE HAVE ADDED MORE FUCKING MICROPHONES! Yes, with two dedicated noise cancelling microphones, now Siri can hear you talk about how awesome you are because you have the new iPhone in even better quality...and not bring up search results for "How I know I'm a Dick..." by mistake after mishearing you. All that REALLY IMPORTANT stuff you say will sound even MORE IMPORTANT! Maybe...again, depends on the quality of the other speaker...HOW FUCKING CLEVER!
6) NEW TECHNOLOGY!
Did you think Apple were going to include the same old shit in their phone? Did you think they'd have the same RAM, processors and antennae technology? OF COURSE NOT SILLY! THIS IS APPLE! Or any other manufacturer bringing out a new product...Yes! Thanks to the AMAZING AND UNIQUE INNOVATION at Apple, they have taken lots of components that other people not affiliated with Apple have made better. They have also, counter to common sense (presumably) improved their custom chipset to make it EVEN BETTER! They have, since the iPhone 4 been working on it!...AND PUT THEM IN THE IPHONE! This is...just...SERIOUSLY MARVEL AT THE GENIUS INVENTION OF THE APPLE GENIUSES! How fucking clever.
7) LUDICROUS PRICETAG!
Apple knows you! Apple knows! Apple knows you don't want to buy a reasonably priced phone that fits your budget, doesn't bankrupt you and still performs well doing all that stuff you love...like calling, texting and playing Angry Birds! APPLE KNOWS YOU WANT TO BUY STATUS WITH MONEY YOU DON'T HAVE SO YOU CAN LOOK LIKE YOU HAVE MORE MONEY THAN YOU HAVE! They know you want a mobile phone contract that contains things you don't use, for a price well above the odds, as well as having to pay a little bit extra for the phone...Because obviously price = STATUS! The more you pay for it, the better a person you must be to have all that money. So they have given you 24 month contracts of £35-40 with a £50-100 charge for the phone...Just for you, so you know people won't think you're poor, even though you are and are even more so now because you just got the new iPhone! Apple also knows that as a result of the blacklisting of your name due to County Court Judgments due to not being able to pay your last phone contract, Apple knows some people can't have phone contracts any more and need pay as you go...SO APPLE WILL SELL YOU THE iPHONE 5 FOR A LUDICROUS PRICE ANYWAY! So people still won't think you're poor...Good ol' Apple, looking out for you. How fucking clever.
Mind, meet blown!
Thursday, 13 September 2012
Slender - A Short Review
Slender.
Just the name of it sounds scary. Like a hideously withdrawn, stick-thin, pseudoscientific 'nutritionist' bint, with more bone than meat to her composition, about to tell you how to change your diet so you can be just as ghostly and soulless as her.
Slender.
Sounds like a brand of artificial sweetener that aforementioned nagging bint would recommend you use because sugar is bad for you.
Slender.
Like trying to say 'surrender' when you can't speak, because you haven't eaten properly for two weeks on the advice of someone with a PhD from the internet, and the mouth cancer your artificial sweetener caused!
SLENDER!
It sounds creepy!
For those who do not know, Slender (or Slender: The Eight Pages - as the current working title is) is a free, first person horror game currently in beta - From Parsec Productions. It first came to my attention by watching notoriously glorious, infamous, misogynistic viking and King of Sweden, Robbaz play it. I thought little of it at the time, but then, like Slenderman in the game, the game itself seemed to pop up and gaze at me wherever I turned.
The premise is quite simple. You, in some woods, with a flashlight. You find creepy hand drawn/written notes, and you are chased by what looks like a faceless version of that long armed waiter from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life "I wonder where that fish did go!?"
...That's it, pretty much. No deep, intense psychological tests and manipulation á la Silent Hill. No needless hordes of zombies á la Resident Evil. No immense plot, no sense of claustrophobia, no subtle trickery. Just you, in the dark, being followed.
I'm going to tell you something about so called 'scary' games. They don't scare me. I'm going to tell you something about Slender. It scares the living fuck out of me! It seems to tap in to a primal instinct to look for danger. You can't look at Slenderman - that's how he gets you...BUT YOU HAVE TO! You need to look around, you need to find the pages and part of you, a tiny, curious part of you knows he may be there - and dares you to look. You don't hear footsteps behind you, but you know he's there. He's everywhere. A tree pops into your peripheral vision and you give a little start thinking 'Oh God! I thought that was Slenderman!' - Your vision gets all interfered with when he's nearby. Like static on a television. But when that happens, you don't stop and run. You turn...You look. You have to...And you hope you don't see him, but know you will and when you do your heart races. I am not kidding. Play this, at night, alone and with the lights off.
What makes it creepier? Slenderman does not move. Slenderman does not run after you. Slenderman pursues you inactively. He is there, and he will get you. Like the grim spectre of death, he lingers and merely waits for the moment. He doesn't have to hunt you, you will go to him eventually. There is a creepy, horribly primal thing with this game. The simplicity of it and lack of characterisation is all the immersion you need. You feel the helplessness, you feel the hopelessness, you feel the fear as if you were actually in this situation. Or, at least, I did...and it's rare for me to do so for a 'scary' videogame.
So, if you like a good fear-based thrill, check out Slender - It is free, it is good, it is fun and it is, for me, genuinely quite scary.
Slender: The Eight Pages by Parsec Productions
Just the name of it sounds scary. Like a hideously withdrawn, stick-thin, pseudoscientific 'nutritionist' bint, with more bone than meat to her composition, about to tell you how to change your diet so you can be just as ghostly and soulless as her.
Slender.
Sounds like a brand of artificial sweetener that aforementioned nagging bint would recommend you use because sugar is bad for you.
Slender.
Like trying to say 'surrender' when you can't speak, because you haven't eaten properly for two weeks on the advice of someone with a PhD from the internet, and the mouth cancer your artificial sweetener caused!
SLENDER!
It sounds creepy!
For those who do not know, Slender (or Slender: The Eight Pages - as the current working title is) is a free, first person horror game currently in beta - From Parsec Productions. It first came to my attention by watching notoriously glorious, infamous, misogynistic viking and King of Sweden, Robbaz play it. I thought little of it at the time, but then, like Slenderman in the game, the game itself seemed to pop up and gaze at me wherever I turned.
The premise is quite simple. You, in some woods, with a flashlight. You find creepy hand drawn/written notes, and you are chased by what looks like a faceless version of that long armed waiter from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life "I wonder where that fish did go!?"
...That's it, pretty much. No deep, intense psychological tests and manipulation á la Silent Hill. No needless hordes of zombies á la Resident Evil. No immense plot, no sense of claustrophobia, no subtle trickery. Just you, in the dark, being followed.
I'm going to tell you something about so called 'scary' games. They don't scare me. I'm going to tell you something about Slender. It scares the living fuck out of me! It seems to tap in to a primal instinct to look for danger. You can't look at Slenderman - that's how he gets you...BUT YOU HAVE TO! You need to look around, you need to find the pages and part of you, a tiny, curious part of you knows he may be there - and dares you to look. You don't hear footsteps behind you, but you know he's there. He's everywhere. A tree pops into your peripheral vision and you give a little start thinking 'Oh God! I thought that was Slenderman!' - Your vision gets all interfered with when he's nearby. Like static on a television. But when that happens, you don't stop and run. You turn...You look. You have to...And you hope you don't see him, but know you will and when you do your heart races. I am not kidding. Play this, at night, alone and with the lights off.
What makes it creepier? Slenderman does not move. Slenderman does not run after you. Slenderman pursues you inactively. He is there, and he will get you. Like the grim spectre of death, he lingers and merely waits for the moment. He doesn't have to hunt you, you will go to him eventually. There is a creepy, horribly primal thing with this game. The simplicity of it and lack of characterisation is all the immersion you need. You feel the helplessness, you feel the hopelessness, you feel the fear as if you were actually in this situation. Or, at least, I did...and it's rare for me to do so for a 'scary' videogame.
So, if you like a good fear-based thrill, check out Slender - It is free, it is good, it is fun and it is, for me, genuinely quite scary.
Slender: The Eight Pages by Parsec Productions
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