The TikTokification of comedy

I fucking hate TikTok. I hate “short-form content” in general, which means I loathe YouTube Shorts, Instagram/Facebook Reels and anything anyone feels the need to send me that is in a 9:16 aspect ratio. So if you’re considering it… don’t. I won’t watch it.

My reasons for despising short-form content are numerous and varied, so I won’t go into all of them here, but one thing in particular vexed me so when I stumbled across it yesterday that I felt the need to get this particular rant out of my system. And that is what I call the TikTokification of comedy — or, to put it another way, the divorcing of comedic moments from context purely so that idiots can quickly and easily steal them and share them on their mindless social media.

I’ve actually been thinking about this for a while. The first time I was particularly conscious of it was when I started seeing that a number of comedians had started upping their YouTube presence. And all their videos had a few things in common. Take a look at these thumbnails:

All of these are completely transparent clickbait. And while a certain amount of clickbait is a necessity on a platform as saturated with material as YouTube is, I really detest the whole “half a sentence” thumbnail format. I didn’t click on this one, which has almost certainly floated across your YouTube recommendations at some point, either:

This, to me, is the YouTube equivalent of the Twitter engagement bait (that thankfully seems to have died a bit of a death… along with the rest of Twitter) where a brand would go “[our brand] is _________” and expect people to “fill in the blank”. And people, dumb consumers that they are, absolutely would. And it didn’t matter whether they were filling it in with obscenities or bootlicking nice things, it was engagement. It made the numbers go up. That’s all that mattered.

It’s the same with these comedy clips. I like all of those comedians above, but I don’t want to click on their videos because it’s rewarding manipulative behaviour, and also encouraging the main problem that I want to talk about today: encouraging people away from enjoying a creative work in its entirety and towards a grab-bag full of “best moments” that completely lack their original context.

Good stand-up comedy makes the entire show into an event, and runs a narrative thread through the whole thing. Not all comedians do this, but the best comedians, in my experience, make you feel like you’ve enjoyed a complete story by the time you’ve left the room. Sure, there may have been some deviations along the way, and the story may not have made all that much sense… but there was still a sense of narrative progression. A beginning, middle and end, if you will. For some great examples, check out Rhod Gilbert’s show Rhod Gilbert and the Award-Winning Mince Pie and pretty much anything by Eddie Izzard.

When you slice a show up into little bite-sized bits, you lose that context. Sure, the individual moments might be funny on a superficial level, but you lose the added depth of them being part of something bigger. And that’s a real shame. And this leads me on to the real reason I’m writing this today: my discovery yesterday that Friends, a TV show I absolutely adored during my formative years, has its own YouTube channel.

And yes, you guessed it, the Friends YouTube channel looks like this:

The stand-up comedy thing I can sort of forgive. While I much prefer seeing an entire stand-up set and enjoying that feeling of context and narrative, there are sometimes just single jokes or routines that you want to share with someone. And you can probably make the same argument about Friends.

But for me, and regardless of what you and/or the general public might think of it now in 2023, Friends was always about more than just the jokes. Friends was a phenomenon. Friends was about us spending 10 years alongside these characters in an important, turbulent part of their lives, and watching them grow and change. Friends was about us simultaneously being envious of these twentysomethings somehow being able to afford massive apartments in Manhattan, but also feeling like the moments they shared were relatable in their own ways.

And an important part of the entire experience was context. While Friends actually starts kind of in medias res, halfway through a member of this pre-existing friendship group telling a story in their favourite coffee shop, it still makes an effort to introduce us to everyone through the way Rachel enters the picture as a formerly estranged friend of Monica.

We feel included. We feel like we’re learning who these people are — and over the course of the subsequent ten seasons, we really get to know everyone. And while the age of the show means that life in general is quite different for most folks right now — look how infrequently anyone on the show uses a mobile phone or a computer, for example — it’s still relatable to anyone either going through that “20s to 30s” part of their life, or who has already been through it.

These characters grow and change as a result of the things that happen to them and the simple act of getting older. They enjoy amazing high points and some heartbreaking low points — although nothing too heartbreaking; this was a primetime comedy show, after all. But everything that happens helps to define these characters and make them more than simple, mawkish, two-dimensional representations of a single personality trait.

Slice all 236 24-minute episodes up into one-minute chunks, though, and you have content. You have individual moments that, in many cases, simply don’t really work as standalone “jokes” because they rely on you knowing and understanding the characters and their relationships. And you have no sense of that ongoing growth and character development, because all these clips are posted in a seemingly completely random order determined by whatever the person running the Friends YouTube account felt like putting up today.

I realise this is a bit silly to get annoyed and upset over, but it’s frustrating to me to see something that I loved so much in its original form and its original context be treated as fodder for the mindless content consumption machine of 2023. It irritates me to think that there are doubtless some people out there whose only contact with Friends will have been minute-long clips on YouTube, and through those they will likely have formed a totally different opinion of the show than someone who watched it from start to finish.

Is this elitist and gatekeepery? Not really, since Friends itself is easy enough to watch in its entirety via either streaming services or undoubtedly cheap DVD box sets that no-one wants any more. It’s just the latest symptom in a disease that blights society, where no-one believes they have “time” for anything any more, so watch badly cropped minute-long 9:16 clips on double speed while they’re doing their daily quests in Mindless Gacha Bullshit X, rather than settling down, taking some time to relax and just enjoying something in its entirety.

I hate it. Hate it. And while I’m aware there’s nothing stopping me from doing what I describe above — I think I even still have my Friends DVD box set somewhere — it’s exhausting just to be around all this short-form garbage, and frustrating to live in a world where seemingly no-one has an attention span longer than a TikTok video.

#oneaday Day 878: I’d Tap That for £70 of In-App Purchases

Despite my day job, which is reviewing mobile and social games for the fine folks over at Inside Network, I have to confess that the reason some of these games end up being quite so popular eludes me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m trained to spot a free-to-play game that’s going to be profitable a mile off… I just can’t pin down the reason as to why some of these games resonate with people so much. And no-one seems to want to tell me, either.

(Naturally it probably goes without saying that these are my personal, not professional views. But I’ll say it anyway. Oh, I already did.)

Let’s take a title called Rage of Bahamut as a case study. Rage of Bahamut is a game for iOS and Android devices. Ostensibly it’s a “card battling” game in which you collect (virtual) cards a la Magic: The Gathering and then use said cards to do battle, either against other people or “boss” monsters. There’s also a large number of “quests” that you can take one of the characters represented on your cards on, the ability to organise players into “Orders” and cooperate, trade cards, help each other out on difficult fights and all manner of other stuff.

Sounds pretty good, right? Well, it’s not. The game features one of the most dreadful user interfaces I’ve ever seen, with most of the game looking like a Web page from the early ’90s, albeit without animated “Under Construction” GIF files. The “quest” feature consists entirely of tapping a button, watching a short animation of a monster dying and observing your stamina bar gradually decrease as your experience and “quest progress” bars increase. Battling another player involves selecting your cards in advance, pressing “Battle” and then doing absolutely nothing. Battling a boss involves selecting your cards in advance, pressing “Battle” and then doing absolutely nothing. Oh, and there’s no sound, either. It wasn’t deemed necessary, it seems. The game’s sole slightly redeeming feature is that the anime-style artwork for the cards is quite nice, but that certainly doesn’t make it any fun to play. At all. Go on, try it. (Android users, go here.)

Despite this crippling lack of entertainment value, somehow the game is presently the third top grossing game on the iPhone — and it has been at the top of that chart in the last few days, too. It’s free to download, meaning that people are enjoying this hateful, monotonous, tedious pile of steaming un-fun crap enough to want to voluntarily hand over money.

Why?!

It’s not the only game of this type which has enjoyed success, it’s just the most recent. Various studies by research companies indicate that the majority of profitable apps on the various app stores of the Internet include in-app purchases in one form or another — and many of these titles are of the free-to-play variety. I have nothing against free-to-play as a concept or business model, but I do question the taste of some people when something as unbelievably lacking in virtue as Rage of Bahamut proves itself to be more profitable than lovingly-crafted paid apps which developers have poured large quantities of time and money into. This depressing tale from Joystiq springs to mind.

I can’t help but feel that the press is partly to blame in all this. Titles like Rage of Bahamut often get great reviews from the press despite their lack of innovation, gameplay, interface design or anything even resembling entertainment, when in fact they should be summarily panned for providing an experience akin to scrolling through an Excel spreadsheet equipped with a macro that requires you to click “OK” every ten seconds.

But then I guess I’ve never seen the appeal of football management games, either…

(Incidentally, if you’re looking for a card-battling game that’s actually good, try Gamevil’s Duel of Fate, Hothead’s Kard Combat or Kyle Poole’s Shadow Era.)

#oneaday Day 779: Snark Pit

I’ve kind of had it with snark. The whole “let’s piss on everything” parade that shows up any time something vaguely interesting or cool happens is getting really rather tiresome, and over the last few weeks and months I’ve actually been taking steps to minimise my exposure to it by simply unfollowing people on Twitter who prove to be irritants in this fashion. (British game journos, you don’t come off well in this poll, by the way, naming no specific names.)

Unfortunately, on a day like today, which held among other things the promise of a hotly-anticipated iPad-related announcement from Apple (which turned out to be “The New iPad” with its shiny retina display and quad-core processor… yum) it’s difficult to avoid said snark. It seems that for a lot of people nowadays that if something isn’t to your own personal preference, then no-one should enjoy it.

At this point I’ll say that I’m well aware I’ve been guilty of this in the past, and for that I apologise. (The X-Factor is still unquestionably shit, though. There is no valid argument in favour of a show that gave the world Jedward. I’m just not going to rant at length about the subject any more.) I am trying my best these days to see arguments from both sides, but unless you’re some sort of level 99 mediator, you’re always going to come down on one side or another. So long as you don’t force your views on others and expect everyone to agree with you, everyone should be free to do that. (Unless it’s about something dickish. I think we can pretty much universally agree that those who judge people based on skin colour or sexual orientation can all pretty much just bugger off and sit on a spike.)

I digress. I was talking about snark, and specifically relating to today’s Apple announcements. The new iPad is, by all accounts, a lovely-looking device, and the Retina display is sure to raise some eyebrows. As per usual for an Apple event, the company came out with its usual stuff about how it believed we were entering a “post-PC” era and about how people supposedly “preferred gaming on their iPad” to consoles and computers.

Contentious comments, for sure, but firstly, they’re marketing hyperbole — Apple announcements are press events, after all, and a company as big as Apple is never going to be humble about its achievements or lofty ambitions — and secondly, it might not be quite so unreasonable as you think. Already many households are making use of iPads for simple tasks such as browsing the Web, checking email, watching TV and movies, playing games, keeping themselves organised and all manner of other things. And the sheer number of people who have downloaded Angry Birds, whatever you may think of it (I hate it) should give you pause when considering the gaming-related comments.

But instead of thinking these points through rationally and considering the perspective that Apple might have been coming from, in it was with the snark about how wrong Apple was and how much bullshit they were talking. Up went the defensive walls, and a veritable barrage of snark was fired over the parapets towards anyone who dared to say “hmm, hang on, that’s actually quite interesting, and possibly plausible”. (I’m not saying their comments were true, rather that they deserved greater consideration than immediate outright dismissal.)

It only continued when, as usually happens in Apple announcement events, software started to be shown. The new versions of iMovie and GarageBand for iOS drew particular ire, with various Twitter users making acidic comments about how awful the music people makes with GarageBand supposedly is, and how terrible the “movie trailers” facility of iMovie is.

Once again, no consideration was given to the audiences that these features might be directed at. As a former employee of the Apple Store, let me assure you there is absolutely no love lost between me and the tech giant of Cupertino, so I have no “need” or contractual obligation to defend them — and also, a company the size of Apple certainly doesn’t need my defence either. But as a former employee, I know that Apple customers aren’t just high-falutin’ creative types, gadget freaks, tech snobs and people with more money than sense. I know that people who walk through the front door of that store range from very young to very old; from experienced computer user to complete beginner. I know that there’s a considerable proportion of that audience who came to Apple because of its products’ reputation of ease of use. I’ve even taught plenty of those people how to achieve simple tasks in products such as iMovie and GarageBand, and to see the looks on their faces when they realised that yes, they could be creative with their computers despite their lack of technological knowhow was, to use a word Apple itself is very fond of, magical.

As such, I feel it’s grossly unfair and downright blinkered for people (including professional commentators in some situations) to completely dismiss a considerable proportion of Apple’s audience and declare a feature to be “awful” or “crap” simply on the grounds that they don’t see the appeal, or think that its results are cheesy. (They are, but imagine if you had no idea how to edit a video and suddenly discovered you could put together a slick-looking movie trailer from your holiday footage and upload it to the Internet. You’d be pretty stoked, and you wouldn’t care that it was a bit cheesy. If you were inspired by this ease of use, you might even look into the subject further to find out how to take more control over the stuff you were creating.)

I’m using Apple as an example today since the announcement is still pretty fresh in everyone’s mind. But the presence of snark can be found pretty much any time something interesting is announced or discussed, especially in the tech or gaming industries. You can count on there being an unfunny hashtag pun game mocking the story within a matter of minutes; endlessly-retweeted “jokes” trying to look clever; and, of course, protracted slanging matches any time someone calls these people out on it.

And, you know, I’ve had enough. If you have a valid criticism of something, by all means share it and back up your point. But if you have nothing to say other than “I think this is crap, therefore everyone else should too” then kindly keep it to yourself. Because, frankly, your opinion isn’t anywhere near as important as you think it is.

#oneaday Day 687: E for Exploitative, A for Arseholes

EA and I are done. I will not be purchasing any of their future titles (with the possible exception of BioWare titles — though even those are becoming prone to the problem I’m about to describe) and I think the world should pay attention to what they’re up to, rather than simply letting them get away with it.

What, then, is their sin?

Exploitation of consumers, to put it in simple, general terms. This accusation covers a variety of unpleasant behaviour, and none of it is good for people who like playing games and holding on to their money. Let’s delve into these things one at a time.

Origin

Let’s start with EA’s digital distribution platform Origin. I don’t have a problem with digital distribution platforms which aren’t Steam, but EA needs to accept that I, along with many other gamers out there, choose to rely on Steam for the vast majority of our PC gaming needs.

There are a variety of reasons for this, not least of which is Steam’s ubiquity and social functionality. If you want to see what your friends are up to in an Xbox Live style, chances are, you’ll be able to see via Steam. Most people even add their non-Steam games to their Steam library, so you’ll always be able to see what they’re up to.

Origin has designs on this too, with its own integrated social functionality, but no facility to add non-Origin games. And given that the platform launched with only EA titles, few people are going to want to switch to Origin as their primary means of communicating with friends during gameplay. It’s just silly to try. Steam works, no pun intended. It works well. That’s why it’s popular.

Alongside this, there’s the shady business of EA removing its titles from Steam on the grounds of mysterious, non-specific “policies” that supposedly no other digital distribution services impose on poor little EA. Funny how these objections only arose shortly after Origin showed up.

And then there’s the fact that increasing numbers of people are reporting that they’re losing access to their games — even single-player titles — following often wrongful bans from the EA forums. Granted, some people who have been in touch deserved a forum ban (come on, do you really think making your username “TheGreatRapist” is really going to depict you as a fine, upstanding member of the community?) but even then, there is no way that behaviour on forums should prevent people from accessing the content they have paid for. Rock, Paper, Shotgun is running a good investigation into the matter at present.

And then there’s EA’s stubbornness even when it comes to online games. In their recent mobile releases (which we’ll come on to shortly) all online functionality is handled not through Game Center which is, let’s not forget, built in to iOS, but instead through Origin. This has the ridiculous side-effect of meaning that you can’t use the Game Center app to do things like check high scores or compare games — something which it is designed for.

Anyway. Enough about Origin — except for the fact that EA’s adoption of that particular name is like rubbing dirt into the good name of Origin Systems, who produced some of the finest games ever created.

Project Ten Dollar

This is all the rage now, and not just with EA. I blame EA for introducing it, however, since it was they who talked about it first. But it is not cool to lock off content from full-price games, whether it’s single player or multiplayer. If I pay £40/$60 for a new game, I damn well expect to get what I paid for on the disc without having to enter a selection of alphanumeric codes. And if I buy a used copy of the game, I likewise expect to get full access to the game. People don’t tear out the last five chapters of a second-hand book, people don’t erase five random scenes from a second-hand DVD. So why should a game be gutted for those of us who didn’t want to buy it new, whether that’s due to financial constraints or simply being unable to find a new copy?

An episode of Extra Credits had a good solution for this which would be perfectly palatable to me. If they must lock off content, then charge less for the game in the first place. Sell me a disc with the single player gameplay on for considerably less than $60 and charge me an additional $15-20 for the multiplayer mode — a $15 to $20 that I don’t feel obliged to pay, largely because I rarely play multiplayer modes, anyway — particularly in games that don’t need them.

As it is, Online Passes are a transparent method of fleecing more money out of consumers. They are indefensible.

Drip-Feed DLC

This largely relates to BioWare games. I would much rather have a full-on expansion pack for $15-20 than drip-fed DLC which often adds very little to the experience. The few pieces of Dragon Age DLC I’ve played really weren’t worth the money — they didn’t even integrate with the main campaign — and they’ve put me off checking out Mass Effect 2‘s offerings.

Part of this is for pricing reasons. But part of it is, again, due to the fact that I’d much rather have the whole game up front. In the case of Mass Effect 2, why not hold the release back and include the content in the game? Answer: because it makes more money, which is kind of the root of all these problems. Money-making trumps consumer convenience and goodwill every time.

Thar Be Whales!

By far the most obnoxious behaviour that EA has been indulging in recently relates to its mobile games. First of all, they updated their iOS version of Tetris. This is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. All iOS developers update their games fairly regularly, whether that’s with bugfixes or additional content. And, for the most part, buying that app in the first place means that developer is happy to provide additional content to you for free throughout the product’s active development lifecycle.

Not so with EA. They removed the original version of Tetris from the App Store before replacing it with the new version, meaning that even people who had already bought the original and wanted to take advantage of the new features had to pay again. Dishonest.

Couple that with the fact that the game has added compulsive, manipulative social game features such as an utterly meaningless “rank bar” and virtual currency — both of which you can pay real money to jack up at a higher rate — as well as a subscription option (for Tetris! Seriously!) and you get something altogether unpleasant.

Then there’s Theme Park. Theme Park was a brilliant strategy/building game which many people would love to play again today in its original form. It doesn’t need anything changing. But no — EA decided that it really needs to be a gameplay-free social game, complete with aforementioned compulsive, manipulative mechanics such as an XP bar and purchasable virtual currency. Not only that, though, but some of the rides in the game cost up to $100 of real money to purchase. Let that sink in for a moment. To buy certain attractions in Theme Park, you need to pay more than the cost of one and a half full-price console titles.

The trouble is, there are just enough idiots out there who have more money than sense who will pay these ludicrous prices just to be “the best”. These people are unaffectionately known as “whales”, for obvious reasons — and it only takes a few of them to make such a business strategy worthwhile.

In all, I’m pretty ashamed of EA right now, and have no desire to give them any of my money for the foreseeable future. The trouble I have is that they’re swallowing up otherwise reputable companies like BioWare and forcing them to fit in with their shady business practices. I have no doubt that Mass Effect 3 will be a great game, but I also know that it will have an Online Pass, it will doubtless have a “robust post-release DLC strategy”, it will surely cut out content from the main game to sell back to me at a later date, and it will almost certainly only be available on Origin for PC.

I long for the days when EA were the ones with the funny logo that looked like EOA, and they make games like M.U.L.E. and Racing Destruction Set. I know you can’t go back, but you can move in a direction which doesn’t make you look like you just want to squeeze your customers for every penny they’ve got, rather than provide them with quality entertainment.

In summary: sod off, EA. Get back to me when you’ve had some humble pie.

Talking Point: What do you do when a favourite developer (BioWare) is an cahoots with an organisation like EA? I like BioWare games, as I’ve said above. But I’m strongly tempted to not buy any more for the reasons outlined above. I certainly won’t be purchasing anything from Origin and especially if it’s an Origin exclusive. Competition is good. Removing your products from the competition (Steam) is not.

#oneaday Day 650: Rules are Made to be Kept

“Rules are made to be broken.” I want to go back in time, find whoever coined that phrase and punch them in the testicles. The reason for this is simple: far too many people out there seem to live by these words, and allow subsequent generations to do so also.

This was particularly frustrating when I worked as a teacher. As a teacher, you’re expected to uphold the behavioural standards of the school and punish miscreants according to the school’s policies. In most cases, because teachers aren’t able to dish out any form of physical or psychological punishment, this means Giving Them A Detention. Fair enough. If you gave a child a detention and they turned up to it, this would be an effective punishment. However, unfortunately, in the vast majority of cases, they will not turn up at all.

Let’s take a couple of examples. In the first school I taught at, there was this objectionable little scrote in one class who constantly played up, threatened other children, swore, gave attitude to adults and was generally someone you really didn’t want to have around but had to. Attempt to punish him for his relentlessly obnoxious behaviour and he’d simply come back with the response “my Mum says I don’t have to do detentions, so I’m not going to.” And indeed, she didn’t think he should have to do detentions, and as such he didn’t.

Another example comes during my brief stint as a primary school teacher. One of the brightest kids in the class was, unfortunately, a little arsehole behaviourally. Much like the previous example, he’d swear, shout, get angry at adults, punch and kick his peers and occasionally storm out if he felt like it. He’d also goad the real problem child in that class into kicking off and causing trouble. When I confronted his parents with his behaviour one parent’s evening, they told me that they’d taught him to retaliate if he ever thought he was being treated unfairly. You really can’t win in that situation.

It sometimes surprises me how little regard people have for rules and even laws in reality. Obviously people don’t go around murdering each other or anything, but small thing like littering, smoking and doing things that signs politely ask you not to do — all of those make a regular appearance.

It was particularly apparent during our trip to Legoland this weekend. In some of the queues for the rides were small Duplo stations where bored kids could build things. On every one was a sign saying “please do not build tall towers” — presumably so they didn’t collapse, spray Duplo everywhere and make a mess. And yet in every instance, what was the first thing built by kids? You guessed it.

It wasn’t just the kids, though — the adults were just as much to blame, whether it was not correcting their children when they did something they’d been politely asked not to, or smoking outside the designated smoking area for no apparent reason other than to be slightly (but not massively) rebellious.

Accusations of this country being a “nanny state” are often bandied around, and often with some degree of accuracy. But just because we feel that we’re being regulated too tightly on some things doesn’t really mean that we should just only follow the rules that we think we should. I’m not talking about blindly following instructions and being a mindless robot here — I’m talking about following rules that just make common sense or are based on courtesy. If you’ve been asked not to smoke in the nice family-friendly theme park, smoke in your little smoking area — at least you’ve been provided with one. If your children are doing something they shouldn’t, inform them that they are doing something they shouldn’t — and don’t get pissy with someone else if they ask you to keep your children under control.

Also, get off my lawn, you pesky kids don’t even know you’re born, etc. etc.

#oneaday Day 597: An Open Letter to That Guy Driving Up My Arse with His Lights on Full

Dear Sir,

I have not bothered to address this post “Dear Sir/Madam” because you and I both know that if there’s someone on the road driving like a dicktwat, it’s inevitably a person of the penis-sporting bloke persuasion, and often sporting a small penis at that. (I have no actual empirical or scientific evidence for this, but it is a fact.)

I write with regard to your driving this evening, when you drove up our arse (not literally) with your lights on full (literally) in an attempt to overtake by any means necessary. I can only assume that you were either on some sort of secret mission and being pursued by Polish mobsters or that you were Polish mobsters pursuing someone on a secret mission. Otherwise I can’t possibly imagine what would require you to get past quite so urgently on a relatively quiet Wiltshire road at about 7.30 in the evening.

I do hope you didn’t find the fact that we were driving relatively slowly to be too much of an inconvenience. Obviously being in our own car we were unable to hear what you were saying, but doubtless you were encouraging us to drive faster. However, as you undoubtedly discovered when you did eventually get past, we were ourselves driving behind a large milk lorry which felt the need to brake for every slight corner, however shallow it might have been.

I trust that nothing in your car’s interior or about your person was on fire at the time of you requiring to get past with such urgency. As I have already intimated, I am somewhat at a loss as to exactly why you would need to be in front of us quite so urgently. Perhaps your scrotum was being eaten by a flesh-eating bacteria and you were on the way to receive treatment at a hospital. However, if this was indeed the case and you find yourself the unfortunate victim of scrotal flesh-eating bacteria again in the near future, I would encourage you to call for an ambulance rather than attempting to drive there yourself. Having your scrotum eaten by flesh-eating bacteria is doubtless somewhat painful, or at the least somewhat irritating, which would take your attention off the road to an arguably dangerous degree. While it may be embarrassing to explain to the nice ladies and gentlemen on the 999 line that your scrotum is being slowly ingested by said flesh-eating bacteria, you’ll only have to explain yourself in person when you eventually arrive at the hospital clutching your ballsack to yourself like a bag of marbles with a hole in it.

Perhaps I have misjudged you. Perhaps you were, in fact, on a humanitarian mission to deliver food to poverty-stricken families in a Third World country. If this was indeed the case, however, you are a long way from the nearest airport, being in deepest darkest Wiltshire as you were. And although there are plenty of hills here, I doubt very much that parking atop one of them and throwing the food off would carry it far enough to reach its intended recipients.

Or perhaps I was correct in my initial snap judgement of you in that I believe you are a bellend. The fact you overtook first us and then the milk lorry on a dark road with little regard for whether or not anything was coming the other way suggests something of a devil-may-care attitude towards life which some people may find laudable but others may find to be the mark of a tit-faced wanksplat. I am, as you may have guessed, in the latter category.

I remain, sir,

Yours,

Pete Davison

#oneaday Day 553: Classic Post

You know what annoys me? Apart from chavs; people who use too many exclamation marks; people who forget to put question marks on the end of emails and then send a whole new email saying just “??”; inappropriate use of the tongueface smiley when there’s really nothing worth sticking your tongue out over; onions; Facebook; getting an itch on the part of your back you can’t reach; terrorism; Michael Pachter; cameraphones at concerts; and computer hardware failing, of course?

The word “classic”.

Now, there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the word “classic” when used correctly. Dracula is a classic novel. Monty Python is classic comedy. Judas Priest’s Painkiller is a classic metal album. Super Mario World is a classic video game.

Brita water filter cartridges are not, in any way, nor will they ever be, “classics”. Similarly, anything coated in chocolate may be tasty but likewise will not, and never will be, a “classic” flavour. Running OS 9 apps on old OS X machines using the Classic interface does not make me think “Gosh, I wish using a computer was still like this.” And my bank account is never going to go down as a work of great literature or indeed an influential work of economics, despite my bank’s assertion that it is a “classic” account.

I’m not sure where this stupid trend came from but it completely destroys the meaning of the word. This isn’t the first word that modern society has mangled and violated, of course — see also “awesome” (which I confess I’m guilty of using, largely because I talk to a lot of Americans and partly because I used to work for Apple — the two things essentially being one and the same in terms of daily communications and what it does to your typical vocabulary), “epic”, “fail” and doubtless numerous others.

But “Classic”? Seriously? I doubt in twenty years’ time people are going to be looking back at the cartridges Brita water filters used and thinking “yes, that really was a classic of early 21st century water filtering design, but my, how primitive it looks now!” Or maybe they will. Perhaps early 21st century domestic engineering will become something of an art form in the near future, when we all have robot servants who will eventually and inevitably rise up against us but in the meantime get exploited by us lazy bastards.

Wait, I seem to have stretched my brain across the fourth dimension. Let me bring it back to the present.

Yeah, you think I’m taking the piss with the water filter thing, don’t you? Well suck on this:

“Classic” water filter my arse. This, of course, being branded as a “classic” water filter cartridge now implies that there’s some sort of edgy contemporary water filter out there which probably hangs around on street corners smoking marijuana and tagging walls with cans of spraypaint. A water filter so edgy and contemporary that it doesn’t filter your water at all, it just spits it back in your face and tells you to go fuck yourself because this is 2011 and, like, dude, there are people out there who have no water at all and you’re worried about sucking back a bit of limescale?

I may have overthought this somewhat and indeed deviated slightly from my original topic. I think on that note it may be time to go and lie down for a little while. Good night!

#oneaday Day 548: Capcommotion

I’m a bit surprised by the way Capcom have been acting recently. I always used to figure them for a company that had their collective heads screwed on pretty well, and with their Capcom Unity (geddit?) site showing a much greater effort than many publishers to engage with fans, it looked like they were getting 21st century marketing right.

Then came the Mega Man Legends 3 project, where the community would be able to play an active role in the making of the game. The Capcom Dev Room page allowed users to submit ideas — many of which would end up in the final game — as well as see how the development of a game progressed from start to finish, complete with all the trials and tribulations it faced along the way.

The other day, the project got cancelled on the grounds that its transparency was proving to be “quite concerning” for the rest of the company. This, to me, is somewhat worrying, and suggests that Capcom has something to hide. It could be something as simple as the fact that they actually haven’t done any real work on Mega Man Legends 3 since Keiji Inafune left last year, or it could be something altogether more sinister along the lines of the Team Bondi fiasco.

This isn’t the only mis-step Capcom have made recently, either. The Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D save game issue stank from start to finish. To say that it’s “not possible” to erase a save file on a 3DS game card is absolute nonsense — erasing a file involves writing to the card, and in order for the save to be on there in the first place the card must be written to. So there is absolutely no way that it would not be possible to reset the save data, yet Capcom persisted in perpetuating a lie to the community.

And today we learn that there’s an “Ultimate” edition of Marvel vs. Capcom 3 on the way, featuring 12 new characters, 8 new stages and a spectator mode. But existing DLC characters aren’t included in the package, naturally. And the “Ultimate” edition is a standalone retail product for $40, not a DLC expansion, which it really should be. I should be excited by the fact that Capcom have finally added Phoenix Wright to the game after a considerable amount of fan requesting, but instead I’m left with a bitter taste in my mouth due to them re-releasing a slightly-enhanced version of a game which only came out in February.

Sadly, this practice is becoming more and more common with this generation of consoles. And while I perhaps wouldn’t go quite as far as my friend Mr Peter Skerritt in saying that this generation “sucks” — there’s a lot to like, after all — I do believe that the obnoxious business practices that more and more publishers are starting to adopt are going to come back and bite both game companies and consumers in the ass at some point in the very near future.

I mentioned something along these lines on Twitter the other day in reference to Rockstar’s comments that L.A. Noire still isn’t finished despite having released its “final” piece of DLC. The response I got was surprising; the practice was defended on the grounds of it making good business sense. If we’re at this stage already where blatant money-grabbing and the cutting of content from games in order to hold it back for subsequent DLC or new retail editions is defended by the community because it makes good business sense, it’s a sad situation indeed. We gamers are supposed to be giving money to the software companies we want to support because we like their products, not bending over and asking in what ways they can violate us next. I’m quite happy to buy a game and never resort to piracy, but with more and more early adopters being punished by having to pay full whack for a product and then being stung for DLC down the line, it’s understandable if people feel disillusioned by the whole thing.

That said, not all hope is lost — since picking up a gaming PC I’ve been using the consoles far less. And while there is DLC for PC titles, many PC gamers are a lot less patient with this sort of bullshit — largely because there’s an enormous and active modding community out there more than willing to provide content of a higher quality than Activision’s $15 map packs for free. And there aren’t many PC games I’ve played recently where there’s a big hole for some DLC — I intend on going back through Mass Effect 2 at some point, so I may feel differently after that, though.

The most frustrating thing I find is that people don’t seem to realise or care that they are being taken advantage of. We can complain all we like about Capcom releasing the same game twice in the space of nine months, but we all know that there are enough people out there who will happily part with their cash and give Capcom the sales figures they need to justify rolling out this obnoxious business practice again and again. We can bitch all we like about paying $15 for Call of Duty map packs, but people pay it, again showing Activision that it’s Okay to Do This. And we can point our fingers and say L.A. Noire’s add-on cases should have been in the game in the first place, but I bet most players picked them all up just out of curiosity if anything, giving Rockstar the green light to do more in the future.

It’s refreshing to see that not all of the industry is operating in this way, though. Indie developers are flourishing — and the community is taking to them. Indie RPGs Breath of Death VII and Cthulhu Saves the World along with awesome roguelike Dungeons of Dredmor topped the Steam sales charts on their day of release, and in less than a week on sale BoD/CStW has equalled its sales from a year and a half on Xbox Live Indie Games. Minecraft continues to go from strength to strength. And Frozen Synapse proves more popular than its developers could have ever dreamed.

Right now, I’m thankful that the indies exist, because with every day that passes, each new “teaser reveal”, each new embargo, I’m losing more and more respect for the big publishers.

#oneaday Day 542: Irritating Creatures

Everyone has some kind of flying, buzzing, biting, stinging thing that they find particularly annoying. In fact, most flying, buzzing, biting, stinging things are particularly annoying. Spiders skitter around and hide, jumping out when you’re in the middle of something and causing you to spill staining drinks all over the place. Wasps buzz around your face repeatedly, muttering “shall I sting you, shall I sting you, shall I sting you?” and then fuck off out of the window. And mosquitoes are completely invisible but you can always hear them.

There are two creatures, though, that are so immensely pointless that their already annoying natures are amplified a billion bajillionfold. They have elements in common, but they’re also quite different. They fly, they don’t bite or sting and they don’t really make much of a noise. But they’re infuriating.

I am, of course, talking about the daddy long-legs and the moth. Both follow the immensely annoying pattern of “Ooh! Light! I must fly towards this! Ouch, shit, it’s hot! Ooh, light! Ouch! I’m on fire a bit. Maybe I should fly around and bump into things some more. Hey, a TV! That’s a light. Maybe I’ll sit on it. No, I think I’ll fly around and bump into things a bit more.”

I mean come on. Seriously. It doesn’t help that having a daddy long-legs or a moth fly into your ear when all the lights are off and you’re not expecting it is one of the most terrifying things in the world — good luck sleeping after that happens — but really, what is the point of these creatures? Daddy long-legses (well, you tell me a better plural) supposedly possess an incredibly lethal venom but have absolutely no means of administering said venom, making them absolutely completely and utterly pointless. (My evidence for this factoid is, I admit, a Ricky Gervais stand-up show, so I do take this supposed knowledge with something of a pinch of salt. But still.) Unless their big purpose in life is just to repeatedly headbutt television sets and fly into people’s ears. If that’s not an argument strongly against the concept of intelligent design, I don’t know what is.

Now, I’m sure there’s a reason for them existing in the whole food chain and whatnot. But if that’s the case, can’t they please just for one night not fly in through my window and be irritating? That’d be just lovely. I’m pretty sure that the whole food web that Nature has worked out involving these creatures doesn’t involve a Hoover as the primary predator.

Or perhaps it does. That’d be weird.

#oneaday Day 532: The Unholy Trinity

Someone found my blog by searching for the terms “trinity estates” southampton today. So I’m assuming that they’re interested in the estate management company that used to be in charge of the apartment block I used to live in on White Star Place in Southampton. This area was also known as College Court, or so the mail that wasn’t for me that kept getting delivered would have it, anyway.

So, hello. How are you? Are you dealing with Trinity Estates? Are you a member of staff from Trinity Estates aiming to see what your company’s social media footprint is? Are you a landlord researching estate management companies prior to making the commitment to purchase an apartment to rent out?

Well, whoever you are, I can say with complete and utter confidence that Trinity Estates are a complete load of old shite. And I can tell you exactly why, too. Some of the reasons are already outlined upon this very blog, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to go over them again for those who haven’t encountered this useless excuse for a company. I’ll say all this with the caveat that I haven’t lived in Southampton since last September and it’s entirely possible that they’ve bucked their ideas up since then, but somehow I doubt it.

Their main problem is their lack of enthusiasm to do anything. They’ll write a letter, sure — in fact they write lots of letters — but when it comes to actually doing anything useful? Nah.

Let’s take one example. The block I lived in had a covered car park at ground level and the apartments started on the first floor (second floor to you Americans). Inside the car park, there were lots of pipes on the ceiling — mostly waste pipes, I believe. One night I heard the sound of running water outside, but didn’t think anything of it — at least not until the next morning, when I had to go and retrieve my car from the car park.

Said car park stank of shite. There was a reason for this. The sound of running water was from one of the pipes on the ceiling which had burst and was, as a result, spraying shitty water everywhere. Fortunately, my car was parked nowhere near the “blast radius”, but several residents’ cars were. One green car in particular was festooned with lumps of crap and wads of bog roll in the morning. I felt sorry for whoever it belonged to.

Several days later, the pipe had been “fixed”. But not in a sensible manner, no. It had been fixed by wrapping duct tape around it. Duct tape that wasn’t very waterproof, meaning it still leaked a bit — though thankfully not quite as much as before.

Then there was the time the basement flooded. In this case, water was actually entering the building and gushing into what turned out to be an electrical cupboard. A phone call to Trinity Estates in this case yielded an uninterested-sounding operator who said he could either get someone down to us the following day (I took great pains to point out the fact that the building was, as I had already said, flooding and presenting an increasing risk of an electrical fire) or immediately, but that there would be a charge for an emergency callout.

Eventually, it transpired that the residents would have to leave the building, because the water and electricity were going to be turned off while the problem was resolved. Thus began several days of sleeping on friends’ floors — actually a relatively welcome diversion as it was not that long previously that things had gone fairly disastrously wrong in my personal life — and wondering exactly how long it would take the company that I described back then as a “festival of incompetence” to sort things out.

To their credit, things were sorted out after several days and we were able to get back in. What they had failed to take into account, however, was the fact that the building was locked with an electronic keypad which doesn’t function when the electricity is off. Fortunately, a drunken chav had had the foresight to tear off the door to the basement/car park entrance to the building in a fit of drunken twattishness, so when I suddenly realised I didn’t have something that I really needed, I could actually get back in without too much difficulty.

As an aside, they also said that the dirty great hole they dug outside the block for the workmen to get in would be guarded by the police 24/7 to ensure that kids wouldn’t play in it. On all the occasions I went back to the block while work was supposedly going on, there were 1) no workmen in the hole 2) no policemen guarding the hole and 3) children playing in the hole. So good work there, then.

In summary, then, oh mysterious reader who came across this page in search of information on Trinity Estates’ work in Southampton — they are shite, and if owning a property involved dealing with them on any level, I would urge you to think very carefully about what you’re getting yourself into — or run away screaming.

If you work at Trinity Estates and you’re reading this, know that you made an otherwise very nice apartment complex into quite an unpleasant place to live at times. Well done.