TOM FRANCIS
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A Weak Russian Sunset

It’s Sunday night, but I’m on holiday! I am spared that awful Sunday night feeling, somehow so much worse than Monday morning, when I realise that I actually like my job. I wasted the first two days of my holiday sleeping ten hours a night to recover from my three-week binge of sub-five-hour nights and an inescapable drowning feeling. The only upside of that sorry cycle is that I get the wholly wonderful song Feather By Feather stuck in my head, by the increasingly wonderful Smog, largely thanks to the gallingly wonderful opening verse:

The reason I’m telling you of all people this is that losing an irreplacable chunk of the next day – particularly in winter – gives things a weird, sad atmosphere. I’m waking up to weak yellow sunsets, a beautiful but incredibly bleak light that seemed to last all day in Moscow. Hang in there a little longer, we’re approaching the point now. There’s a map in Battlefield 2142 set in Minsk, Belarus, and the sky texture captures this exact sight, light and feel magnificently. I find myself loading it up, alone, and flying a futuristic airlift craft to the top of a skyscraper to get out and admire the view. It’s built for forty-eight players, but the testers have stopped playing so there are no multiplayer games going on. Not that I’d want gunfire spoiling the mood.

By divine coincidence I only just this week realised how much I like Two Dots On A Map by the Russian Futurists, another gem from the Fluxblog mines. Not only does it have ‘Russian’ in the band name, but it’s also magnificent, majestic, sweeping and unbearably sad. I don’t know what the backing vocals are saying, but the last lines are:

I choose to hear “If we knew we were” as implying that we are, but aren’t facing it. Which is true, and awful.

I actually thought this mopey wistfulness might be a sign of age, but I just now found a text file on my hard drive describing exactly the same thing, written by me in 2002. So I’m just repeating myself, which is worse.

So… I think I was trying to lead in to the subject of game-music associations, which are brilliant. My favourites:

Half-Life 2 and The Great Destroyer, by Low: two of the best things about planet Earth released at the same time – it was a good November. To this day I’ve never actually listened to Low while playing Half-Life 2, because I like Half-Life 2’s in-game music, but I alternated between the two so reliably that the connection forged nonetheless, and now I can’t stop at those weathered, deserted seaside shacks overlooking the glassy sargasso without hearing the exultant Walk Into The Sea, nor whack that childless dangling tyre with a crowbar and not hum a few bars of California. This is another sad one, isn’t it?

System Shock 2 and Cobra And Phases Groop Play Voltage In The Milky Night, by Stereolab: ba-ba b’dow b’dah. Bubbly futuristic electro-pop played over paranoid dystopian futuristic action RPG. I subconsciously reconciled the two by identifying this album’s off-kilter jauntiness with the hollow optimisim of Xerxes’ pre-recorded broadcasts to the long-dead crew of the Von Braun. Good save, subconscious!

Deus Ex and Voodoo Wop, by Clinic: itchy stompy scary medical drone punk played over a nocturnal interactive conspiracy theory? Well, they’re both uneasy, inaccessible and dark.

Hitman: Blood Money and Deep Cuts, by The Knife: sheer coincidence, I assure you, that I got into these at the same time and that the last screenshot I posted of Hitman was of cutting someone deeply with a knife. There’s no connection between music and game beyond the violent overtones – The Knife aren’t even that sinister, a lot of the songs are upbeat or simmeringly sexy.

Yeah, so they’re a little sinister.

Event-Inspired Idea: Cellphone Breathalizer

My first post to a long-time favourite site, the Halfbakery:

Build a breathalizer into the mic section of a cell-phone, and have it measure the alcohol content of your breath as you start to speak, or breathe into it while waiting to be connected. If it detects mild levels of intoxication, it mutes the mic for a second and plays a pre-recorded message to the recipient of your call to the effect of:

“I’m sorry, but the caller you are talking to is inebriated. Please disregard anything they may say.”

If it detects extreme levels of intoxication, it disconnects you, dials a taxi firm, retrieves your location from a GPS component, relates it to a street via the Google Maps API, then text-to-speeches that info into a pre-recorded message to the effect of:

“I would like a taxi from [place name] to [home address]… yes, it’s [surname]”

So far four people have found the idea croissant-worthy, while two have inexplicably deigned to fishbone it. Weak.

Dexter

Plenty of awesome things starting on US TV at the moment, and plenty of awesome things returning, so I missed that an intriguing show I read about in the paper months back had started – until Graham supplied the pilot. Played by best-thing-about Six Feet Under Michael Hall, Dexter’s a sociopathic compulsive serial killer with a day job as a forensic analyst for the Miami police, specialising in blood-splatters. And killing murderers. It’s not about him taking out the guys the police can’t prove their case against, it’s about him desperately needing to sate his bloodlust and deciding to at least restrict himself to the more deserving victims. And it is, of course, superb.

Dexter fakes normal, happy life with aplomb, making the atmosphere absurdly sunny and upbeat. His boss fancies him, his sister depends on him, and he has a doting rape-victim girlfriend he dates because neither of them are interested in sex. Forensic science is a world in which everyone has to be ghoulishly indifferent to murder just to get through the day, joking about corpses over donuts, so Dexter’s bona fide ghoulishness blends in seamlessly. Only one cop thinks Dexter’s a sick freak barely attempting to hide it, and loathes him violently and openly. Dexter is relentlessly nice in response, and inwardly slightly saddened that only one person seems to have noticed.

The joke, of course, is that Dexter has a superb insight into the workings of a serial killer’s mind, and has to actively try not to catch them in his official capacity in order to keep himself in potential victims. In the pilot, he comes across an ongoing case in which all victims are found neatly dismembered and entirely drained of blood, a style Dexter admires so breathlessly that he has trouble maintaining a professional veneer when he first sees the body – “Why didn’t I think of that?”. His usual distaste for the killers he kills is completely eclipsed by his awe at this man’s style, and the two of them are starting to become fixated with one another – the killer stalking Dexter in the most chilling way, which Dexter takes as a friendly hello.

Really the remarkable thing about him is not that he’s a serial killer, it’s that he’s a well-written sociopath. Like Highsmith’s Ripley he fakes his civilised persona so well that even you are won over by it, and like Ellroy’s Terror his compulsion is so compellingly depicted that you empathise with it almost as much as Monk’s OCD. It proves that a protagonist can be sympathetic irrespective of his crimes if his personality is appealing enough, and you couldn’t ask for a more delicious twist on the traditional ace-detective archetype.

The comments hereafter may be spoilerific for anyone not up to date with the latest episode aired in the States.

Veronica Mars

I’ve been meaning to write properly about why Veronica Mars is so awesome at some point before it kicks off again on the third of October, but for now I’m just messing around with clips. This is my first embed, so wish me luck. It’s one of my favourite moments from the second series:

Too Zune

My MP3 player has finally, inevitably broken beyond repair. It’s stuck on record, it won’t stop recording everything, so it’s just what you want lying around the White House Counsel’s office. And in an odd twist, Apple’s recent MP3-player announcements were more appealing than Microsoft’s. I say odd because Microsoft and Apple are sort of like Churchill and Hitler to me: I wouldn’t want to hang out with either of them, but there’s “not nice” and then there’s the holocaust. I could never buy either, but I really like that Apple have made each of their models dramatically better in at least three ways each, and reduced the price. I always like it when a company goes further than strictly necessary to maximise sales.

Microsoft’s MP3 player, apart from looking like a seventies TV set (update! Or a complicated biscuit, as Tom puts it), is a festering hive of digital rights-management restrictions. It has the cool-sounding ability to wirelessly share tracks with other Zunes (sans PC), but restricts the sharee to three listens of the track before it’s deleted. To do that, it actually infects your music with its DRM chastity belt, even if it’s an MP3 you recorded your damn self. Having grown up with computers, I’m afraid I’m one of these techno-hippies who regard data as sacred. It seems fine to me to offer services like iTunes where you buy music with restrictions built in, but my stuff is sacrosanct. Your seventies TV has no idea what it is, where it came from and what I’m entitled to do with it.

So I somehow found room to be offended by that even though I didn’t want the feature and knew I wouldn’t buy one anyway. The core reason I can’t use a Zune or iPod is that both insist on their own evil infection of your machine. iTunes is the reason I don’t flinch when comparing Apple’s products to the holocaust. The Zune, like anything that wants to support Microsoft’s DRM stuff, uses the Media Transfer Protocol to talk to your PC. That means it isn’t a storage device you’re free to use as you please; everything you transfer to it has to go through Windows Media Player 10. This is disastrously unreliable, slow and restrictive. MTP will actually stop you from copying a file type that Windows Media Player doesn’t recognise to your player, even if the player itself specifically supports it. MTP devices show up in Explorer, and are mocked up to look like storage drives, but you’re restricted to the default view, your right-click options are taken away, and you can’t open files directly from the device. Explorer is about the only part of Windows that still almost works intuitively, though XP tried its level best to obfuscate it and mollycoddle new users into misunderstanding their system, and they’ve specifically crippled it to be less logical and usable with respect to MP3 players. I will enjoy watching you fail, Microsoft, even if it is to a greater evil.

Some brands pointedly boycott MTP, or at least pointedly include a UMS option – USB Mass Storage, an older protocol from the days when things were built to work rather than monitor and defy you. Sandisk’s Sansa players have had an aggressively anti-iPod campaign, and bragged about their ‘just works’ driverless storage device functionality, but they do lose marks for also supporting MTP as an alternate mode (“I’m clean, but also support herpes as an alternate mode”) and only supporting video in Quicktime format. Their contempt for Apple’s proprietry restrictiveness would ring truer if they hadn’t co-opted Apple’s own grossly inefficient, poor-quality, bloated, slow and disgusting QuickTime format. More admirably but more cumbersomely, bovine-sounding Cowon make UMS-only players, proudly support OGG (an open-source music format, more efficient than MP3), and have a ridiculous 35-hour battery life on their larger model. My favourite musical gadget site Anything But iPod specialise in alternatives, and are good about specifying MTP or UMS in their reviews. My hope is that Microsoft having their own player to pimp will mean they stop putting pressure on once-cool companies like iRiver and Creative to cripple their players with MSDRM-friendly FFS-inducing MTP, and that Anything But Zune launches soon.

Something I Didn’t Understand But Still Feels Right

It’s September the eleventh. Not only the day that Alec Meer left PC Format, but apparently something exploded in some distant oligarchy. It’s funny that the attacks of that day are always referred to by the day, and not the attacks. Are there other historic events that are just called a date, no adjective or even location? It’s like we don’t really know what happened. Didn’t Iraq invade or something? I have dates like that – Friday Before Last, I call one of them. I don’t know what happened, but when I woke up my bike was broken and upside down with the handlebars twisted 360 in my garden. I’m still picking up the pieces after FBL. I intend to construct four enormous towers to show my drunk self that I’m not afraid of it.

There’s a suggestion the amnesia is willful. Somewhere I have a 100MB zip disk with the only copy of an elderly New Yorker’s photos of the collapse, first-hand and close up. She gave them to me, a near-stranger, when I met her because she never wanted to see them again.

Today is a bad, not to mention clichéd, day to remember this. Ze Frank, whose fast-talking scary-eyed vodcast I’ve only been subscribed to for a few weeks, but on which I’ve already come to rely, got his in early. Last Thursday his show wasn’t funny. Instead, he just gave a simple yet extraordinary account of what he did on that day, the haze of physical pain, drugs and rubble smoke through which he tried to see what had happened. He didn’t.

Don’t Blog While Stupid

I was just about to write an attack on browser programmers for not making the space bar scroll down one page when tapped, then discovered that it already does exactly that.

A Woman’s Life In Search Queries

Somewhere between the recording someone made of AOL refusing to let them cancel their service and the story about the woman whose father AOL insisted on billing for nine months after his death – once telling his daughter to “shut up” when she protested – I missed the part where AOL released all thirty-six million search queries that five hundred thousand of their users made over the course of three months. Continued

Paris Laptop Consciousness Drip

John didn’t come on this trip because it was a day, a little more in fact, for a page, which is presumably less than he could otherwise earn. This trip is to Paris, to see the World Of Warcraft expansion The Burning Crusade. The choice is easier for me: Paris, or office with terrible vending machine, the pay is the same (though not as much as for a page of freelance work, I might add). I suggested that he should come, because it was Paris, but couldn’t come up with a more articulate reason than that, and also the exact arrangements weren’t worked out.

The exact arrangements turned out to be great. The Eurostar’s at 7.30am tomorrow, so I as a Bathican am being put up in a hotel in London for the night. I failed pretty miserably to get to London in time to do anything really, and even my lame plan of going yuppie and blogging from a Starbucks on Belvedere street were foiled by closing times. Instead I’m typing this offline (the Rock Extreme laptop I’m reviewing is picking up the Thames Online wireless network, but not well enough to get net) on a bench next to a hairy old black guy playing very lonely saxophone. I call this yuppohemian.

The hotel is the County Hall Marriott, which is on the Thames, next to the London Eye and Big Ben, and is pretty difficult to believe. I actually kind of laughed when I walked into my room. Hang on, the tour guide lecturing the old Americans on the bench behind me has just told them no-one in England is named Mary because a famous one burnt so many consonants. I think he’s remembering his history and quite a lot else wrong. Okay, now the busker has wondered off sadly, quietly missing out on whatever I was half-planning to give him on my way back to the hotel. Should I pay in advance the next time I pick a bench based on the jazz? No.

I have just cracked my knuckles for the last time, perhaps ever. I will likely crack them again within the minute. I am trying to avoid it, though, on discovering just how many people it annoys and to what extent. It seems a strange thing to be annoyed by – I think it’s perceived as a conscious action, but in fact it’s as involuntary as yawning and far harder to resist. I can’t say I know what the negative side-effects of stopping woudld be, though, so I’m launching an investiagtion. I’m going cold turkey on knuckle crack. God damn it I nearly did it right then. I need a cigarette.

The whole thing – the hotel, this is – is some kind of cylinder built into an enormous courtyard within the same building as the London Eye ticket office. I’m getting the cylinder shape from the corridors – once you get onto your floor, they arc round in a huge circle. My room is vast, the bed has ten pillows, and the window is aimed at the sunset over the Thames with willful precision, igniting the whole thing in orange as soon as I opened the curtains. I am so thirsty. I’ve just discovered the tree I’m sitting under is full of blue lightbulbs. Is this the sort of thing I habitually don’t notice?

Breakfast at 6.30 tomorrow. I feel like I should have something fried to take advantage of it being free, but I also feel like I should never eat anything again. As flattering as the lowlight of the hotel bathroom is, it doesn’t disguise that my new bad habit of eating lunch every day has now begun to counteract my good habit of cycling up a formidable hill on the way home from work. I think the dude who just walked past saying “There are worse places to watch porn” was talking about me.

There are worse places to write. It’s properly night now, and windy with it, but so warm that even my T-shirt feels superfluous. I’m next to a streetlamp engulfed in a swaying tree whose leaves glow as they wave at the light, and the effect is something you wouldn’t see in Oblivion on this laptop, because you pretty much have to disable Canopy Shadows if you want a decent framerate at this things insane native resolution. Ooh, so nearly got through this trip without a Real World Graphics joke. It’s become a tradition now. Dammit! I have cracked. It feels… bad, not doing it. A vague and nameless badness. If I had to give it a name I would probably called it Arthritating, but I would also probably think about it a bit longer so it’s hard to say for sure that that’s what I’d go for, or even if it would be on the shortlist.

I sometimes miss the start of conversations. I sometimes ask people what they’re talking about, as politely as possible, but if I can I just join in not knowing what we’re talking about. The other journalist on this press trip was talking about someone’s gaming habits, specifically exploring game worlds like Far Cry, and I love mountain climbing in the places you’re not supposed to be able to get to in Far Cry. She was saying that he, who’s name might be Dan from what little I overheard of the start, likes to take the hang glider as far as possible, and use it to soar to strange places. Me too! “Who’s this?” “My dad.” Ah, Terry Pratchett then. This is the next day now. I charged my laptop on the Eurostar on the way back, and have enough juice for a few words on the night train to Bath. I’ll have to cycle with this ponderous bastard up Watery Lane, the sharp ascent back to my house, a lofty realm of such good digital reception that one nearby estate is called Freeview Road.

It turns out I’ve met Rhianna Pratchett three times, but didn’t recognise her the second time (hair colour change?), and I think I thought she was a voice actress from the way she was talking about a game’s dialogue. This time, I totally recognised her from the last time, but since I didn’t know who she was last time that wasn’t an awful lot of help. Incredibly, I managed to surmise that this person had, too, worked for Nevrax on Saga Of Ryzom and wrote for PC Zone without connecting her identity with the other very similar-looking person of whom both these things were true. They kind of cottoned on to one another in my head a while later, far too late for me to admit my confusion without embarrassment. Luckily, one of my super-powers is the ability to go from a position of astounding ignorance to perfect understanding without any external reaction at all. The cure for cancer could dawn on me without elevating an eyebrow.

Have you ever seen an orc bored? That’s not a joke set-up. Actually it could be: it’s enThralling. Anyway, that’s what I saw today. The guy wandered mopily between the chambers of the cellar at this event and couldn’t muster a snarl when photographed. I prescribe emancipation.

Found And Lost

It seems like only yesterday that some of my desk surface was visible, but it apparently wasn’t and I have been asked to excavate. Among my findings:

• Fifty-six copies of PC Gamer 148’s cover CDs.
• One wicker apple, without lid, empty save pistachio-shell crumbs.
• Doom 3 box, empty.
• UT2004 box, without lid, empty.
• One spoon, large.
• One paper box, contents unknown.
• The head of a plastic penguin with red hair and yellow eyebrows.
• One open packet of coffee grounds.
• One billion (approx) business cards (own).
• Three quarters of a billion (approx) business cards (others).
• One painted wireframe and tissue-mache effigy of me, 8″ tall.
• One purple, yellow and green feathered mardi gras mask.
• Nine pens.
• John Walker’s cafetiere.
• Three ultrillion sheafs of paper of text that no longer seems to mean anything.
• One cardboard cutout of me, articulated at joints with gold pins.
• Twenty issues of PC Gamer.
• Forty duplicate issues of PC Gamer.
• One copy of Stereolab’s Emperor Tomato Ketchip: score!
• One bigillion blank taxi receipts, for expense claim fraud.
• One Morrowind Ordinator lead figurine, 2″ tall.
• One City Of Villains scorpion dude plastic figurine 3″ tall.
• Twelve hundred E3 press discs.
• Nine hundred hundred unwanted DVDs.
• One inflatable chain-mace.
• One inflatable gray (green).
• One foam Darwinian.
• One FSP fridge magnet, ugly.
• One tennis shoe, belonging to Mark Sutherns of Creative Assembly.
• Seven point nine thousand hundred City Of Villains trial code stickers.
• Five USB storage devices of between 64MB and 1GB capacity.
• One Radeon X300 graphics card with a display output socket unrecognisable to the staff of either PC Gamer or PC Format, but which I swear used to plug straight into my regular monitor without fuss.

Trivia: My Firefox Extensions

But actually, this basically turns Firefox into the Google Browser, a program in which your Google account is your master login for all others, and your personal information is now completely detached from your home PC, and is entirely online and accessible anywhere. I am naive, and much more easily excited than concerned.

Firefox’s Extension window is one of the slickest pieces of programming I’ve ever seen. When you open it, Update buttons appear next to anything that has a new version out, and you can click them all straight away and they’ll all update simultaneously, in seconds, without asking you anything or making you click okay or waiting for each other to finish first or looking things up or conflicting or breaking or failing to find things. Extensions are user-created content; it’s extraordinary to see the host program supporting them so dotingly. Even Steam is years off being this clever.

Top 100 Musings #1: Battlefield 2

Out Of Office Auto-Blog

I’m in America for a few more days, the end of a week-long press trip with three different companies, to see around fifteen games. Anyway, here are some photos.

Dan above the firey water feature in the LA hotel’s bar.

The X ride at Magic Mountain – the only thing in the world more extreme than a guy jumping out of a helicopter on a skateboard and the skateboard is on fire and the helicopter is exploding maybe.

I spilt my drink, and this guy pulled out that card. It was pretty surreal, but he gave us our own cards to use in the event of further accidents.

Dan and I had been to Santa Monica beach last year too, so we decided to tour it on reclining trikes this year.

A busker – or maybe just a girl playing guitar for fun – being appreciated. Drive-by photography; you don’t get the whole story.

Rollerblades are faster, but I am faster than some regular bikes on one of these. There are no gears, so you have to pedal pretty stupidly.

Mike makes movies of his trips for X-Box World’s coverdisc, but probably doesn’t use much of this footage.

New Ritual

It’s been a good month. I’ve spent most of it chronically exhausted from nightmare-induced sleep deprivation, ill, or feeling like I’m drowning in a treacle comprised of my own meaningless words, but still somehow a good month. Despite feeling like I’m getting nowhere with anything, I’ve written twenty-six pages of articles for the next issue to hit the shelves, and two of them have been the result of investigative digital tampering to acquire information no-one else has, something you could almost call journalism if it was about something serious. It wasn’t; it was about robotic aliens and death Gods; but that just made it more fun.

Now I’m sitting in my newly tidied room listening to the bluesy new Cat Power with my window open and bare feet, freezing slightly but enjoying the night air too much to do anything about it, and idly researching a link between avian flu and a fictional virus dreamed up last millenium.

I used to have a ritual, once I’d finished the disc each month, of stopping at Shakeaway for a carrot cake milkshake on the way back from delivering the masters to the postroom. Since I’m no longer a disc editor, I’m enstating a new ritual for when my work on an issue is done, based on a throwaway line by Amy Gardner from the West Wing:

Amy: I fought you, I lost, I went home, took a shower, had a drink. You know what I do when I win? Two drinks.

This month: two drinks!

Favourites

Putting together the fireworks post reminded me how amazing Flickr is, and also led to an addition to my very elite, frequently pruned Favourites collection. Click through to get to the large versions: