Although I’m not too broken up about the slow death of the traditional print press and the move to online, I must admit that one of the things that I’ll miss is opening up the letter page of a tabloid when I’m waiting for a bus or in a cafe to read the furious, illogical ramblings of misinformed people.

Yes, comments sections on online articles can be pretty great too but lack the inherent hilarity and smugness you get from the realization that the drooling idiocy that gets published was the best of thousands of submissions.

Sometimes though, sometimes you read something so ill-thought out and blisteringly idiotic that you just have to respond and I don't mean previous blog entries, the following example is worse than those.

Normally I’d leave this kind of work to the fine folks at Tabloid Watch but I had to answer the call of duty on this one. The letter I’m about to post was from Tuesday’s Daily Mail and is entitled ‘TURN BACK TIME!’ (Copied verbatim, if anyone doubts me, I’ll happily provide a scan.)

“HERE are some lovely services we had not so long ago: we remember the petrol station attendant who, when you pulled in, would come to your vehicle, put in the amount you asked for (without you getting out of your car), wipe your windscreen, take your money and wish you a good day.

 The baker who came to the door three times a week with a basket full of bread and goodies for mum to buy.

The milkman who came to virtually every house in the street every day of the week.

The dustmen who actually came to your door, took the bin out and emptied it and then brought it back in again.

The shop assistants who stood at their counter until you went in and asked for something which they would then pop-off and fetch for you. There was even a chair for people of a certain age who couldn’t stand for too long.

The village man who was employed by the council to keep all the verges and hedges cut and was proud of his work.

And the good old AA patrol-man who would potter along on his motorcycle seeing to any stranded member and, best of all, saluting to every car he spotted approaching him showing an AA badge.

They call this frantic ‘nobody else matters’ world we live in ‘progress’. I think not.

Mike Orchard, Sussex”

Wow, there’s a lot to tackle there. For those readers who are busy and want the short version, this Futurama clip neatly encapsulates my reaction.  

If you’re in for the long haul, let’s break it down point by point;

“HERE are some lovely services we had not so long ago: we remember the petrol station attendant who, when you pulled in, would come to your vehicle, put in the amount you asked for (without you getting out of your car), wipe your windscreen, take your money and wish you a good day.”

The petrol station itself is less than twenty feet away from the pump. As much as I like convenience, I’d rather reap the benefits of the savings passed on by the petrol station not having to employ someone to stand outside all day to save customers the harrowing twenty-foot death march.

To be fair, Mr. Orchard, I do agree with you about having the windscreen wiped without me having to get out of my car. If only modern cars had some kind of automated window-washing device, or petrol stations provided some kind of completely automatic car wash.

Pictured: Hypothetical self-washing window that does not exist.

“The baker who came to the door three times a week with a basket full of bread and goodies for mum to buy.”

That’s just unreasonable. Why would bakers offer that service on top of the delivery services they already offer, especially when they are competing with online food delivery, high-street bakers and supermarkets?

There are lots of easy ways to get food delivered with minimum effort without the menace of extra-road traffic as bakers  do unnecessarily rounds just to preserve some aspect of your youth, regardless of how feasible or beneficial it is to the rest of the country.

“The milkman who came to virtually every house in the street every day of the week.”

There still are milkmen, they just only deliver to houses who request deliveries because that makes far more sense and is better for everyone.

“The dustmen who actually came to your door, took the bin out and emptied it and then brought it back in again.”

Take out your own bins. Dustbin-men have long and hard enough job already.

“The shop assistants who stood at their counter until you went in and asked for something which they would then pop-off and fetch for you. There was even a chair for people of a certain age who couldn't stand for too long.”

I’d reiterate my point that I’d rather get the savings from shops not having to employ extra staff. This is a convenience that doesn't exist any more  I’ll grant you that but in its place stands internet shopping and self-checkouts that have made the retail experience far, far easier.

“The village man who was employed by the council to keep all the verges and hedges cut and was proud of his work.”

The village I grew up in during the 90’s had one; the one I live in now has one. That’s a local issue you should take up with your council (there may be very good reasons for not employing one), so I fail to see how it’s a sign of some great flaw with modern Britain.

“And the good old AA patrol-man who would potter along on his motorcycle seeing to any stranded member and, best of all, saluting to every car he spotted approaching him showing an AA badge.”

Why? Emergency telephones and mobile phones let you make callouts with ease, without the additional costs and traffic of patrol men.

Although again, I agree with you on your last point as I see no problem with a man driving at high speed on a motorcycle taking his eyes off the road and one hand off the handlebars to make to adorn motorists with gestures to make them feel like Mussolini.

(in terms of being saluted all the time, not in the whole being lynched thing, although I’d imagine the patrolman would feel like he’d been lynched after he inevitably loses control of his motorcycle when saluting a motorist.)

“They call this frantic ‘nobody else matters’ world we live in ‘progress’. I think not”

No they don’t. They call the global instantaneous communications network progress, they call the cure for once fatal diseases progress, and they call Old Crafty Hen progress and rightfully so.

God-bless modern Britain

Let's play Dark Corners of the Earth; Prologue Part.1

This took a really, really long time. Things got in the way, not helped by the fact my brain runs on Valve time

Before I go into the game proper, I thought some background might be appropriate. I’d always liked Lovecraft’s horror concepts but never read any of his work proper until 2009, when I read a blog post (Entry on the 16/4/09 by internet funnyman and game commentator Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw) briefly discussing his own experiences with the man and his work. I’ve been toying with the idea of playing Dark Corners of the Earth ever since but I never got around to it until now, through a combination me not being able to find game itself until relatively recently and it having a reputation for crashing, freezing or having bugs that can render the game unwinnable.

However, as I said in a prior post, sometimes a particular work of entertainment fails because it’s trying to employ and use too many big ideas and either can’t get them to work together or within existing structure. I realize I sound like an apologist snob here (as if things I like or think sound interesting didn’t really work because the petty constraints of the medium, genre or laws of physics were just too primitive to handle the artistic genius at work), I don’t mean to be but something that fails due to over ambition is at least going to be interesting, if only in the sense that it’s an awful but compelling train-wreck you can’t turn away from.  

So let's get into the game. Immediately, things take a dark and scary turn, as when I tried to start the game it informed me it was going to install Windows Media Player 9 components onto my machine, then it tried to install said components, then it told me it couldn't, then the game crashed, then it started again and worked fine. So I'm left wondering if what I just installed was a computer or a Windows XP demo disk.

So, this is the first real screen of the game, just before the menu. It does look pretty promising. Although what really concerns me is that last sentence; "This is perfectly normal, and is unlikely to be a problem with your game disk or your sanity".

"unlikely to be a problem"

I'm running a legally downloaded copy of this game, so there's no game disk to go wrong. I don't like the idea of my computer questioning my sanity. 

It starts off with an eerie shot of Arkham Asylum. Great start but it makes me wonder if there’s a psychiatric hospital that isn’t sinister and evil in popular fiction. (Unless the one from that Green Day music video counts.)

Speaking of sinister, the opening scene continues with the camera moving through the hallways of the dingy asylum, as the pained cries of inmates are ignored by an official of some variety, and into a cell, wherein a dishevelled looking fellow rambles incoherently while writing some kind of diary, surrounded by glyphs written in what I seriously hope is raspberry jam.

Then he stands on a chair and tries to hang himself, probably overcome with the terrors of what he has witnessed. My hopes that it was some kind of PSA against watching Armageddon were shot down when he was rescued by an astute orderly and the game dove into flashback.

We quantum leap in the shoes of our main character as actual gameplay starts, Detective Jack Walters, who is told by the police manning a blockade that the crumbling mansion looming over us has been occupied by insane cultists armed to the teeth that are willing to negotiate only with me.

Being totally unarmed isn’t making me feel any better with this situation, especially when I got close to the mansion and the gunfire started and I had to run into the creepy house full of armed cultists to avoid the crossfire.

And of course, the ground floor has to be completely dilapidated and have paintings of inhuman monstrosities on the walls. The paintings on the wall and the ruined house remind me somewhat of the Lovecraft short story Pickman’s Model.

Moving on, I found a room full photos and writings about my character and this combined with the cultist diary I found, that predicted my arrival, didn’t put my feelings at ease.

Nor did chapel to horrifying creatures from beyond time and space, which has the same mad rambling speech from the introduction written upon it.

And that's just downstairs.

As this is more than 700 words, I shall leave it there and pick it up in the next instalment of this little project (which hopefully won't be another ten billion weeks) and in the mean time, I'll be using the next few entries to get up on my soapbox once more.

Daily Star Has Silly Headline, Game Famous for Not Working Doesn't Work, Bears Shit in Woods

So as it happens, a game legendary for not working turned out not to work, hence my little hiatus combined with a few other things, but the first part of my written commentary of Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth should be up by tomorrow.

In the meantime, I’m going to take advantage of this space and get on my soapbox to go on a little rant about how the Royal wedding is being reported in our press. Before I start, I’m going to declare my bias: I’m pretty big on the whole Republicanism thing. Monarchy does not sit well with me in the modern day and it’s not just a left-wing thing, to me a monarchy is inherently opposed to the values of equality of opportunity and democracy.

That said, I don’t have much ill-feeling towards the Royal family itself. Ultimately; the Royal Wedding is just two slightly boring twenty-somethings getting married. What frustrated me about the Royal Wedding was the way a tabloid reported it. The Daily Star today proclaimed that the Royal Wedding is something that should make you “PROUD TO BE BRITISH.”

Why should this make me PROUD TO BE BRITISH? As opposed to monarchy as I am as a principle, I’d still consider myself patriotic; I’m PROUD TO BE BRITISH when I think what we’ve accomplished as a nation and a people but I don’t see how what is effectively a celebrity wedding is any kind grand accomplishment that should make me feel any more patriotic.

This, however, SHOULD make you proud to be British.

I’d like to re-iterate I don’t have a problem with the wedding, I’m not nearly mean enough to be negative towards two strangers getting married and I think it was a pretty clever marketing move to get Britain into the minds of the world before the Olympics while also being a convenient political smokescreen during a time of cuts and austerity. The more I think about the way this wedding was timed, the more begrudgingly respectful of the government’s political manoeuvring; a fairy story union between the middle classes and the establishment.

I also realize that being critical of the Daily Star for having inane, misleading or just plain stupid headlines is like being critical of bees for stinging people or being critical of Southerners for being effeminate. They can’t help it; it’s just what they do.

The Star apparently thinks it's 1915.

 But really, I can’t be the only person who thinks that suggesting the Royal Wedding being an event that should make you PROUD TO BE BRITISH is silly.

Manc Street Preachers

That pun in the title is so awful a piece of my soul died as I typed it. 

Circumstance driven by mail-related tomfoolery meant that I had to my hometown in southeast Manchester, which meant leaving my gaming PC behind (on which Call of Cthulhu is installed) meaning that I had to delay my little project on hold for the weekend, so I thought I’d use this blog entry to get on my soapbox about something very wrong in the Democratic People’s Republic of Manchester.

In spite of me implying that a large part of Greater Manchester is a haunted backwater in my last post, it’s probably my favourite place in the world. It’s probably just excessive hometown pride, nostalgia for my childhood or fear and hatred of our evil Southern oppressors (in their grand London townhouses, furnished with diamond sofas and fuelled by orphan slave labour gathered in comically oversized nets from the streets of Hackney) but I can’t think of many other places that I have that much fondness for. 

The bumbling face of terror

 

But one thing that I cannot tolerate about Manchester, and every other big city, is the prevalence of obnoxious street preachers. I don’t feel particularly strongly about religion, I personally believe that it’s impossible to prove or disprove the existence of the divine but that’s just me, it’s not my place to judge on matters of faith. What I do feel strongly about is public nuisance; every other day some church or fellowship or whatever feels the need to stand in the middle of Manchester’s Market Street, impeding pedestrians while screaming hostile personal abuse about how everyone listening is objectively and factually wrong and immoral in the way they live their lives. 

I will never understand the mindset that leads somebody to that course of action. You don’t win supporters, friends and converts by hurling blind, insulting and loud assumptions at the very people you are trying to convert; all that does is make your worldview and faith look mental, there’s a reason why advertisements on TV don’t start with “Hey dickhead, your friends hate you and your wife is actively plotting your murder. You should buy our products because it’s not like you have anything better to do.” 

The patron saint of crazy street preachers

 

I’m aware the extremists are in the minority but it’s sad to me that we live in a society wherein harebrained attempts at attention by these lunatics has driven civilized and reasonable debates and discussions about  where we stand in the cosmos away.