Some time ago I wrote that of all the silly ppl on this stale planet who I desperately wished had a blog but didn’t was Stephen Fry.  I wrote it but I can’t seem to find it so maybe I didn’t, maybe I dreamed it, well I am so sorry for dreaming!  Sheesh.

Well guess what!  Bet you can’t guess after that introduction, betcya with poos on top.  Yes he’s started one!  Started it last month in fact so why the heck did no body tell me?

As some of his commenters have pointed out, he doesn’t appear to have quite grasped the concept yet.  He’s so far only made 2 posts, which isn’t surprising considering that both are veritable dissertations.  Still it’s well worth taking a year out from your life to read them because, well it’s Stephen Fry!

I’ve uploaded the somerset photos to flickr baby.

I’m trying out a new look with these and that look is called “OMG Why is that so over-saturated!?” I quite like the look but I’m sure I’ll get bored of it soon.

There are 374 photos in the Somerset set and you will have to study every single one of them right this instant because I am going to test you, and if you fail that test… well your life will not be worth living.

New Radiohead LP next week and I’m so excited and I just can’t hide it I ….  Weird.

It’s gonna be soooooo gooooood, I heard most of the tracks either live myself or from bootlegs and I love them to bits.  The collection of live bootlegs was in itself one of my favorite albums of last year, so I’m wetting myself in anticipation to hear what the studio recordings sound like.

Even better you can pay what you want for it, I just paid what I would have had it been on iTunes, is that tight?  But even if you aren’t bothered about radiohead you could pay just a few pennies and see why they’re awesome.

There’s also a box set type affair, but it’s made to order and costs 40 quid! lol.  You get weird crap with it, and as well as the CD’s everyone gets 2 vinyls as well, what would I do with them?  Suppose I could model a rather smart hat from them.

I guess thom yorke wasn’t too happy with parlophone’s record deal renewal terms.

I’ve gone mad and bought more stuff for my camera.

First I bought a flash, ‘cos the built in one is too harsh and there isn’t much you can do with it.  Also, for some reason you can only push the shutter up to 1/250 when using the built in affair which ain’t no good with my shaky knuckles.  I bought the Olympus FL-36 which is their mid-level one.  Also to go with it I got a Sto-Fen Omni-Bounce.  Which is a peice of frosted plastic you shove over the flash to soften the blow.  Other neat things you can do is rotate it so that it bounces off walls, but I haven’t quite mastered the art.  I’ve no idea what I’m doing really.

When the flash is in the neutral position you can hear it moving some optic around inside its skull as you zoom in and out of things.  No idea what thats all about.

The other piece of nuttiness I’ve gotten is that lens I wanted.  I couldn’t resist it, it was eating me up inside.  It’s a lovely looking object, got a sort of matt look to it, and boy is it heavy.  Thing is at first I was totally dissapointed, I couldn’t even get it to focus on the right things. I even took a photo to demonstrate the problem I was having, and opened a support ticket with the store I bought it from.  The photo is here, and the deal is, I was focusing on where the spoon meets the ruler.

But after using it more I freaking love it, it’s like a game.  I don’t think it’s faulty but that it’s more um, quirky.  I might have sussed it, I shall now talk a load of crap.  I think that there aren’t enough stops around the focusing mechanism for the shallowness of the depth of field.  So I reckon the trick is, take a photo, see if the spoon is in focus, if it isn’t shuffle yer feet forwards or backwards a tiny tiny bit and have another go, hoping the new position will fall into a possible focus position.

Did that make sense?  I haven’t a clue.  Tell you what though I just love the photo’s I can get from it.  As usually Eddie is my subject, with this lens I can make really soft pastelly portraits of him that make him look verging on the sexy!

Some photos taken with it. 

Tried out the BBC iPlayer yesterday, or was it the day before?  Fuck, what the hell does it matter you shitting bastard!

It’s a multitude of immense bouts of stupidity. It only works on Windows, so first, being that I tossed out my boot camp installation a few months ago I kicked up Parallels, which I have a pretty standard XP install on.  So that’s stupidity #1.

First had to sign into the site with my beta invite login.  Here’s stupidity #2, the beta ID wasn’t my iPlayer Login, it was just to access the page where you sign upto iPlayer.  So I had to created yet another login.

Once i’d got a login I choose a show to download.  Ironically the big show on the iPlayer page that day was one of those celebrating Stephen Fry’s 50th, I say ironically because he’s a well known Mac advocate, even going as far as saying he hates windows and Microsoft in general with a passion.  So I choose that one.

It then gave me a sorry message because my system had failed the check list.  Oh I can’t use firefox. Stupidity #3.

So, in Internet Explorer now, tried again.  Chose the same show, this time I got 4 happy green ticks.  Yay…oh, not yay.  Despite the ticks my set up is still wrong, it tells me to look at the point with a red X.  Cept they’re all ticks.  All happy green ticks.  Stupidity #4.

Googled my problem and discovered it’s so specific that I need Media Player 11.  No mention of this by the beeb.  So upgraded Media Player and tried again.  Stupidity #5.

So logged back into the site again, chose the Stephen Fry thing, then guess what.  I’m still not ready, I now have to download iPlayer. Why the heck didn’t the process begin with this?  Stupidity #6.

So I installed iPlayer, went back to the site, chose the Stephen Fry thing.  It then added the show to the iPlayer apps download list.  Pheeeeww.  Ah, not much is coming though.  Left it for a good hour.  Still 0%.  Stopped the download and restarted it.  Nothing.   Stupidity #7.

Life is too short.

If I was the BBC I’d immediate scrap the iPlayer and sack everyone involved.  Just put the shows on an infrastructure already established.  iTunes, or maybe even Joost. It’s simply a waste of resources and license payers money to construct your own.  Just stop it now.  Please.

Gaygamer was DoS’d last weekend.

Bit late with this one, but i’ve been busy OK!?  Apparently, at first it seemed like some silly kid doing some lousy DoS attack for kicks, flooding them with pings and all that, but after a while it was apparent they weren’t going to stop and eventually they started noticing hate filled rants on their forum.

I find this quite scary because I had rather hoped that the internet blogging community were quite a liberal bunch, but if a quirky gaming blog can receive homophobic attacks then nowhere is safe right?

Finished Paper Mario N64 style in record time the other day.

Loved every moment of that damn game so much that it completely ruined any day between buying it on the Wii VC and completing it.

The hardness factor was spot on, it never became frustrating but was challenging enough that I had to at least keep one eye on it.

Good news for my health is that I am not enjoying the sequel Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door any way near as much.  They’ve tweaked the combat and I’m finding it a heck of a lot harder.  The dialogue seems a bit flabbier as well.

We’re still waiting for Super Paper Mario in Europe but in great timing Nintendo have added the original Paper Mario from the N64 to the Wii’s virtual console. It’s 1000 points, which is around 7 quid.

Being from the N64 it’s 3D but with an extremely limited polygon count, it was also obscenely low res, even squinting doesn’t mask the pixels. But, none of this seems to matter with paper mario because the art design is eye poppingly colourful.

It’s a completely different kind of game to what I expected, it’s a japanese style rpg (is JRPG a genre?), that is if you collide with a nasty you’re pulled into a turn based fight, utilizing items and power-moves, but being a mario game many of the moves involve jumping on people’s heads.

It’s similar in gameplay to Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time on the DS, but unlike the DS game which I found a tad forgettable and only something worthy of passing the time with, this Paper Mario is incredibly addictive. I cannot stop wanting to play it! It has some really silly and funny plot points, which in some ways actually remind me of the classic lucasarts point and clicks. Even the dialogue is funny at times.
Unlike other games of this type I’m not finding the turn-based fights annoying, they don’t happen frequently and randomly like the Final Fantasy games, and they usually have enough twists to keep them interesting enough.

I love it so much that I couldn’t resist buying the gamecube sequal. Problem is that that’s trickier than it sounds. All of the usual sites, amazon, game, play only had second hand copies and they weren’t cheap. Even ebay, any going aren’t as cheap as you would expect for a second hand game. I can only presume that it was released during the Gamecube’s waning years and only had some kind of limited release here in the UK.

Also complicating things, many are NTSC and I expect my Wii would toss it out, choking. Did manage to secure a copy in the end, after some hassle for 23 quid which I don’t suppose is toooo bad.

The photo was supposed to be a nice hdr affair but i think I went a bit wrong somewhere.

I’m bored so I think I’ll do a listypoo’s of my 10 favourite bands in the whole wide world

They change so frequently that it’s always interesting to re-evaluate them.

1. Sigur Rós
   Post Rock band from Iceland
   Was a bit late to the party, but upon discovering them 2 odd years ago it was as though I had discovered a thing called music for the very first time. It doesn’t matter that I don’t understand Jónsi’s language because, even when he sings gibberish as on the LP () I seem to understand every utterance.
   Favorite LP: ()
   Favorite Song: Untitled 6 from ()
2. Radiohead
   Art Rock band from England
   It’s the haunting sound the perfectionism of the approach that gets me hooked. I first heard them with Street Spirit, probably watching the Chart Show or something and although I loved what I heard I was all about dance music in my school days. It wasn’t until Paranoid Android that I went all “Right that’s it, I have to go buy their stuff”. OK Computer came out a few weeks later and my jaw dropped. Plus, it’s thanks to Radiohead that I started getting into all genres of popular music.
   Favorite LP: OK Computer
   Favorite Song: Fake Plastic Trees from The Bends
3. The Smiths
   Indie band from England
   My brother, who is old enough to have been into music whilst LP’s still came on vinyl was into the Smiths, though he never saw them perform so that’s no great boast. Morrissey was already into his 3rd or 4th solo LP by the time I started appreciating the music of the Smiths.
   Favorite LP: The Queen is Dead
   Favorite Song: There is a light that never goes out from The Queen is Dead
4. Interpol
   Post Punk band from New York
   There’s something I can’t define about their sound, the music sounds optimistic, sometimes happy, and yet the vocals are delivered straight faced with lyrics that are verging on the surreal.
   Favorite LP: Turn on the Bright Lights
   Favorite Song: Obstacle 1 from Turn on the Bright Lights
5. Arctic Monkeys
   Indie band from England
   Living in Sheffield the Arctic Monkeys are unavoidable, but despite the over-exposure here in blighty they really do live up to the expectations. They really seem to be unable to pen a second rate song, they’re everything you can ask from such a line up. And they’re sweet individuals too.
   Favorite LP: Whatever People Say I Am, That is what I’m Not
   Favorite Song: Red Light Indicates Doors Are Secured from Whatever People Say I Am, That is what I’m Not
6. Plaid
   Electronic duo from England
   They have a playful sound all of their own, ultra-clear, tuneful and pretty damn clever. Probably the main influence on my own crappy creations.
   Favorite LP: Rest Proof Clockwork
   Favorite Song: Undoneson
7. The Libertines
   Indie band from England
   They only survived 2 LP’s before Pete became some kind of weird anti-hero beloved as a play-thing for the tabloids, causing him to be singularly unable to achieve anything of worth. Still, before the implosion their music was majestically riotous, in the the order of some kind of amazing never-ending party. Just put on one of their LP’s and you cannot help grin whatever mood you’re in.
   Favorite LP: Up the bracket
   Favorite Song: Up the Bracket
8. New Order
   New Wave band from England
   On and off again like a yoyo. They grabbed me earlier than most of those in the list because they crossed over into both dance and rock somehow. The overriding thought about them is that they are interesting, which would probably make you run a mile but it shouldn’t in this case.
   Favorite LP: Technique
   Favorite Song: Bizarre Love Triangle from Brotherhood
9. The Pixies
   Alternative band from USA
   So so so much better than Nirvana. They’re catchy whilst brutal, they say that’s because of the quiet-loud style. Who knows.
   Favorite LP: Doolittle
   Favorite Song: Monkey gone to heaven
10. Boards of Canada
    Downtempo Band from Scotland
    Amazingly distinctive sound in a world of samey dance music. They have all these squiggles drifting a few cents out causing you to drift off into some place pleasant but ever so slightly sinister.
    Favorite LP: Geogaddi
    Favorite Song: 1969 from Geogaddi

Someone has stolen my handkerchief.

Big brother 359 started last night.  They filled the house full of women, not even one little cute gay guy.

That’s not what bothers me though.  What does is the lack of Russel Brand to host Big Brothers Big Mouth.  He’s pretty much a presenting and comedic genius, but he’s held up in Hawaii staring in some film or other.

Last night Chris Moyells hosted Big Mouth and OMG it was embarrassing. If anyone needed confirmation of Brands talent they should compare last nights Big Mouth with any one of last year.

He didn’t even roll down his trousers and pants. Without Brand BB is going to be like an empty shell to me this year.

A curious side note, the film Russel Brand is doing co-stars Kristen Bell, and on brands weekly radio show (worth listening to, it’s available as a podcast) he once said something like “She’s in this show in America called Veronica Mars which is like some buffy vampire slayer type thing.”  Hmm, I bet one person on the set told him that and he’s taken it as fact.