Well now that I’m back I should probably try and get this ridiculous challenge over and done with, or at least moan about it a bit more. At this point it is only sheer stubbornness that is driving me forward. I can’ imagine that if I let it wither and die unfinished that there would be a huge clamour to find out how it all ends. But honestly, I really wish I hadn’t started it now, but the idea of getting this far and then no further fills me with the sort of dread I normally only get when Downton Abbey returns.

What do you mean that’s back as well…? Oh for fuck’s…. Anyway.

So, a song that I wish I could play. Well, given that I have the musical proficiency of a smashed lamp filled with bees and broken soldering irons, how about, well, any of them. Or all of them. Yes, I think I’d like to be able to play all the songs. Even the bad ones.

I’d like to be able to play all the instruments on all the songs, in the same way that I’d like to be able to write as well as all my favourite authors, or act like all the best actors. I think if I was going to learn to play an instrument (and I have tried, or at least bought an instrument, which is the same thing right?) then I wouldn’t just settle for learning one song.

But that’s not the point, I know, I’m supposed to think of just one song that I’d like to be able to play. So I suppose I’ll try and think of one that is ridiculously technical, because if I can play that then it probably means that I can play all the songs that are less technical, or at least have the capacity to do so. Of course this is nonsense as well, because being able to play drums like the guy from Origin doesn’t mean you’d have the means to play trumpet like Miles Davis, does it? Unless the drummer from Origin can play the trumpet like Miles. Because let’s face it, Drummers are odd, and most of the ones I’ve met in my life are obsessed with Jazz. And I bet Miles Davis couldn’t have played any of the drums on ‘Expulsion of Fury.’

Sigh.

Ok, if we’re going to talk technicality, but also versatility, then there really is only one possible winner. Well, that’s not true, there’s loads of potential winners. But for the sake of argument I’m saying there’s only one. The Dillinger Escape Plan may have recently been toppled from the top of my last.fm charts, but when it comes to marrying dizzying technical ability with the old fashioned craft of songwriting there really is nobody out there to touch them. Or there probably is, but if I could play any of their songs on any instrument (or sing with anything near as much talent as vocalist Greg Puciato for that matter) then I would be a very very happy man. I’d probably also be in a really good band. Or really good at Guitar Hero, or possibly be able to play it without going into an apoplectic rage. On top of this, they remain the best live band I’ve ever seen, which is quite impressive for a band of such musical complexity. I doubt you’d see any of the so-called guitar legends like Vai being able to play their solos while hanging upside down from the rafters of a sweaty venue in York. And not just because Vai is unlikely to play York.

I don’t really know where I’m going with this. Let’s just roll VT. Here you go, I want to be able to play this song. On any instrument, I’m not fussy.

So, three more to go….

In fact, when just such a failure happened to me last night I chose to see it not as some kind of technical fault, but as some kind of betrayal, and found myself fighting off a mix of nausea and fear for just an instant. As a result, the item in question repaid me by making me the butt of a sitcom joke.

Having had a bit of a rubbish day I returned to my humble abode safe in the knowledge that I was free from the duties of food preparation and ready to put my feet up and watch some telly. That at this time of day the only options available to me would be in the Cbeebies oeuvre mattered not, I just wanted to shut my brain down, and Waybuloo is just as good as anything else for that.

We’ve been experiencing some problems with our Virgin telly service intermittently for the past few weeks so it wasn’t a huge shock or of massive concern to be met with a blank screen. Usually these things last for a few hours at best and these downtimes do not preclude the viewing of recorded stuff from the V+ box. But not this time. Every time I went into click on anything, it suddenly shut off and marked it as viewed before launching a message that the contents of said program were causing a problem. I can’t remember the exact message since I was by this point uttering loud seal-esque barks of dismay and could not see the screen through the tears streaming down my face.

How did I get to be so reliant on such a small little box? Well that’s easy, that box holds pretty much everything from the last few months that I’ve wanted to watch but haven’t had the chance. There are films in there I’ve always wanted to see, the whole of Red Riding, and the end of South Riding. Delights I was faced with never seeing. And how would I record Rocky that very evening?

So, faced with the possibility of being relegated to having to open a DVD case, turn to the internet, reading a book (you know, on paper, a kind of prototype digital display from the past) or heaven forfend actually talking to the people around me, it only took a few minutes before I was angrily punching my way through the Virgin service desk’s automated service, trying to keep my cool lest the person who would be at the other end of the line think I unhip.

The lady on the other end of the line asked a few easy questions, but then I could see it looming ahead of us both, like a veritable conversational cliff face. And then there was nothing else for her to say but:

Ok, what I’d like you to do is reboot it.

You’d like me to turn it off and on again?

Yes.

Ok. Well, yes, that seems to have done the trick, thank you.

And there it was, fully restored with all my v+’ed goodness stored right there. I sighed a monumental sigh of relief and watched my daughter nonchalantly return Cbeebies to the screen.

To be honest I don’t have a lot to add to the picture, today has been excellent, despite the four hour round trip to get to the scan in the first place, for us this baby today stops being some abstract idea and becomes something real, a little life getting ready to come out. At this stage everything looks normal and healthy, so tonight I feel a very happy and blessed man, and can’t wait to meet my new little chap or chapette.

My musical playlists over the past few weeks have tended more towards the 90’s, also known as the decade that music became my whole world. To me, anyway, you might know it by another name. It’s been lovely hearing some old albums that I haven’t heard in what seems like an age, I even forced myself to sit through Nevermind again for the first time in ages, and was quite surprised to find I didn’t really like it all that much any more. The production is quite flat and the drums are boring, although Kurt’s voice is as winning as ever. I listened to In Utero afterwards, a far superior album in almost every regard. I’ve been listening to old Marilyn Manson and Korn and Anthrax and Sonic Youth and loads more. The most depressing thing about doing this is listening to all this great music, most of which I found on MTV back in the day, then turning onto today’s music channels and seeing the endless pillar of excrement oozing out of my screen and speakers, non stop gyrating misogynist blandness.

What the fuck happened to music television? I remember back in the day I grew up with good music all over my telly. Quite apart from MTV you used to find Faith No More on Top of the Pops, the Rock chart on ITV’s Chart Show on a weekend morning blasting Sepultura, or late night shows that showed Rage against the Machine like the Late Show, or L7 like the Word. I distinctly remember one weekend in 1994 sitting and watching the whole of the Rock Am Ring festival being beamed live on MTV, showing Radiohead, Smashing Pumpkins and RATM at lunchtime without even bothering to bleep any of it. I remember shows like Alternative Nation, 120 Minutes, Headbangers Ball. Now MTV is apparently giving up the pretence of being a music channel at all any more, and is dedicating itself entirely to worthless pseudo reality shows like The Hills.

I remember back when we first got Freeview and being excited that there were two free music channels, The Hits and TMF. Then I actually watched them, and realised they were wall to wall pop music jukeboxes with no attempt at programming, just endless repeats of the Top 20 interspersed with fun vacuum marathons called things like ‘Ultimate Bestest 80’s Marathon Weekender Ever!’ Not only this, but they seemed to sync with each other. One would show Best Wham Weekender, the other would be showing Ultimate George Michael Playlist. Even if you were (un)lucky enough to have Sky, the likes of the Q Channel and Kerrang TV were no better, just endless repeats of the same fifty popular rock and indie videos you have seen time and time again. I worked in a pub when they launched Kerrang TV and it was on constantly, meaning I have now seen the videos for American Idiot, Enter Sandman, November Rain and Chop Suey so much that even now when I close my eyes I sometimes still see them.

I do get that these channels do not make much money, and as a result don’t want to spend much money making programs, but honestly the lack of imagination on display is just shocking. I had thought that when Channel 4 bought out The Hits and turned it into 4 Music that I might just, finally, get something vaguely watchable, my memories filled with what that name used to mean, late night documentaries on Chris Cunningham and proper music videos and oddness. But no, it just changed the logo in the corner of the screen and for some reason increased the amount of Beyonce on the screen at any given moment.

What amazes me though is that this is a situation it would take very little to remedy. All you need to do is free up the playlist choices and employ a producer and a presenter who actually give a shit about what they are playing, and know good music. BBC 6 music has proven there is an audience out there who are crying out for something other than bland pop and middle of the road nostalgia. I would love to have the resources to launch a proper music channel, one that had no remit other than to play interesting and diverse music from all types of genre. Unfortunately I can’t even afford a cup of coffee at work, and I work for a company that actually makes coffee.

Anyway, I miss MTV, proper old school MTV at any rate. In its heyday it introduced me to all manner of new music, and I would love for there to be something out there now that could blow my mind ever again. And in case you were wondering, below is the video that got me thinking about this. I saw it first on the telly. When was the last time you could say that about a band you love?

Well that was a fun week. A whole week where I shambled from bed to sofa to bed and occasionally to summon the strength to go and pick my daughter from school. I started to feel more like a human yesterday and forced myself to go and get a haircut and do some writing and do tidying in an attempt to shake the clinging sense of pathetic nothingness that was clinging to me after a week of total inactivity.

Thankfully I am feeling all better now, although slightly worried about the email avalanche that will greet me after a week away from work when I return tomorrow, but that is what you get for being ill I suppose. On the plus side, today I felt essentially back to normal again, and so was able to spend the afternoon making chocolate chip cookies with my daughter, both getting gloriously mucky doing so and coming up with some rather splendid final results. Not bad considering that it was my first ever attempt and we don’t have any scales, so everything was rather a guesstimate.

But as from now, things are back on track, so consider the absence concluded and we’ll go back to the daily blog. Tomorrow will be another Cross Blogination, and I also have something for Demon Pigeon going up this week, and I’ve written a fair bit more of Blood on the Motorway as well.

One thing I have been doing this week, while dying on the sofa, is listening to some old albums, some good, some bad, and I rediscovered this little gem, which seems to fit the mood, and happens to be several levels of nostalgic excellence. Enjoy.

On New Years Eve Rosie, Ellen and myself all said goodbye to two of the closest friends I have, who are about to embark on a six month trip to the far east (lucky bastards) and will be returning not to York, but to one of their parents. And so in the space of two hours I had to say goodbye to the two people who individually remain my longest serving friends in York, and together have been the best sort of friends, those who are always there for you when you need them. So I would like to take a moment to say a huzzah and fond farewell to the magnificence of Jennie Park and Duncan Lister.

Before I get started I’d like to say that I am not worried that this is going to be a de-facto end to friendship, but I think we are all adult enough to know that it will inevitably mean a change to a more occasional acquaintance.  There are lots of my very good friends who I still count as such who I only see every now and again, but I would be churlish to suggest that we are as close as we used to be. That is a fact of life, people grow, you make new friends, get families, move on. So before our paths move too far in opposite directions, a few thoughts.

Jennie I met through another friend when they were crashing on the sofa of a sprawling shared house. She was very young at the time but already in possession of a self assuredness that lacked the arrogance that usually accompanies it at her age. When Rosie gets older her auntie Jennie will be proof (along with others, her Mum most of all of course) that girls can be every bit as geeky and cool as any boys, without ever having to be unfeminine. If she ever needs evidence of this then Auntie Jennie can show her Final Fantasy tattoo.

Right from the moment that Rosie tumbled into my life Jennie has always been a friend whom I can rely on to be interested in her, and who has earned the tag of auntie that we have bestowed on her. When Rosie was younger she referred to Jennie as Auntie Teddie, which is needless to say unbearably cute. Between her and Duncan they have never turned down a request to babysit for us, and I have always felt completely safe leaving her with them, which is amusing when I think about how nervous Jennie was when she first met Rosie, convinced that Rosie wouldn’t like her at the age of one month old.

Duncan I met when we both started at an ill-fated rock pub in York, and we used to have great fun mocking the Goths every Wednesday and complaining about the repetition on the Jukebox on every other night. We drifted apart for a little while before randomly meeting up and discovering that we were both looking for new housemates having become both newly single. I couldn’t have been any luckier in who I found, and I soon discovered that Duncan is actually the most sweet-natured and kind hearted person I have ever met, and along with our other housemate Woody we had a good two years of smoking, partying and good times that I imagine I will still be looking back on with fond memories when I reach a ripe old age. When Rosie became part of the picture, Duncan was the reassuring voice who assured me that I was capable of the task to which I had been appointed, and since her birth has become the silly uncle who plays with her, tips her upside down and is always good for a laugh.

It was quite by accident that they got together, but of course I like to take full credit for the endeavor, when in fact they each declared an interest in each other independently. But it provided one very amusing night in Ziiggys in York as I relayed unnecessary messages back and forth until they just ignored me and went off by themselves. When they got together they fell into place like jigsaw pieces, perfectly suiting each others temperaments. It could even be serendipity, were any of us foolish enough to believe in such notions. From the moment I saw them together, and then the stupid grin on Duncan’s face for the next week, I had a sense that there was a finality to the event, two people firmly being removed from the merry go round of dating.

And now they are off to see the world together. I’d be upset that they were depleting our babysitting stock by a full one third if I weren’t so bloody proud and excited for them. So here’s a metaphorical raising of the glass to Jenny and Duncan, best friends, and Uncle Dunckle and Auntie Teddie. You’d better come back to us, better keep in touch, but I wish you both adventure and happiness, and we will see you soon.

But enough of all that moping, as it is of no benefit to anyone. So, we’re only two days out and so the prep work for Nano is now fully underway. Well, when I say underway what I really mean is that I am looking at a lot of Wikipedia pages, talking to the odd few people who are science that i know and making a mental note of all the music I want to listen to over the course of November. Of course as well as this I am having odd, furtive thoughts along the lines that I should be doing a lot more prep work around characters and plot, but I’m going to do my normal Nano tactic of sitting down on the first day with only a rough idea of a plot rather than any concrete details. By doing that i get the joy of coming up with everything as it happens, which leaves you with a really lovely feeling of the words flowing through you. It may not lead to the most comprehensive first draft but then that’s not what Nano is for anyway. And that feeling, that the writing is somehow beaming straight from my imagination, is precisely what I enjoy about writing in the first place. But then you may want to remind me of this when I am two weeks in and I have written myself into an interminable corner of plot hell that I can’t think of an escape from.

So Sunday night I will be settling down, perhaps with a glass of cheap wine, watching as the clock strikes midnight and i set off on my big adventure. Don’t forget that if you too want to have a crack at this Nano malarkey (I nearly forgot, hello to any new readers from the Nano forums *waves enthusiastically*) then you can sign up by visiting the NaNoWriMo website.

So, this is officially my first blog entry and I thought I would share with you something that has occupied far too much of my life both recently and in the past.

On October 1st FIFA 11 came out and as an avid fan of the series I was playing it come 09:30 a.m. on release day, having booked the day off from work and forewarned anyone of note to not be disturbed. This was going to be epic. I wasn’t even gonna have to cook. I had pizza for lunch and pizza for tea. I was living the dream. Or so I thought…

Every time a new version comes out there is always something that annoys me about it but eventually I get over it and power through. This time however I have felt nothing but contempt and hatred for a game I once loved. EA have managed to totally balls it up. I tell you this having already amassed almost 200 games played and played all the little variations and nuances that make this gigantic cluster-fuck so utterly dreadful.

Firstly, let’s start with the commentary. Andy ‘I just stated the bleeding obvious for the umpteenth time’ Gray pisses me off with his constant ramblings of yesteryear and his willing lap-dog Martin Tyler barely getting enough time to speak with all that arse kissing and back slapping. Now I really don’t give a shit what either of them have to say but when you’re hearing the same recycled shit that you were hearing in FIFA from almost three years ago then that is just lazy. As far as I can tell there may be about 20 new things they say but when they say that Man Utd are catching Liverpool up, in league titles, as opposed to having equalled it last season (bastards) then that is crap especially when it’s meant to be the most up to date and complete simulated football gaming experience available. There are also so many glitches in it that it beggars belief. My favourite being when Tyler says the player had made an excellent tackle only to have a free-kick awarded to the opposition. Which leads on rather nicely to my next point…

The game play is ruined by the constant stop-start awarding of free-kicks. It’s like at the world cup when every referee is on ‘best behaviour’ and throws out fouls and yellow cards for fun. If you like Serie A (Italian football) then this is the game for you because that is what it feels like. If you tackle from behind it is widely accepted, even if you get the ball, to result in a foul and the awarding of a free kick but FIFA goes that one step further and seem to include tackles from the side and front. Hey its a give-away on free kicks! But wait a minute… you get a free kick so that’s pretty cool, right? Wrong. The taking of free kicks in this version is next to impossible and the previous one was renowned for its awkwardness so I wasn’t expecting to whack them in from 50 yards out. In 200 games I have scored 4. Four!!! You get roughly 4 decent free-kick positions in an 8 minute game. That’s a 0.5% conversion rate. Yeah! I’m not a novice or inept, the controls haven’t changed in years and I like to think of myself as a good player…

So you can’t score free-kicks but penalties must surely be easy yeah? Hell. No. Whoever came up with the current penalty system is a cunting bastard of a twat. Firstly there is this gauge which goes from left to right and you have to stop it when it gets into a tiny slither of green. That seems easy enough as that’s quite common in many RPGs… Wait… You also have to apply the correct amount of pressure for the power which also has its own little gauge to look at… Wait… Surely you just need to point in a direction yes? That must be it! No!!!! You also have to apply pressure in the direction you want it to go and too much will send your shot skyward like the sales of tickets to the funeral of Courtney Love. So that’s three amounts of pressure to contend with whilst the bloody pad is vibrating maniacally. Penalties in real life are a lottery but in FIFA the odds are so slim that you’ll want to smash your controller through your beautiful flat screen and chew the disc up into an inoffensive mush.

Ok so the commentary is shit and set pieces awful but surely the rest might be ok? Here is a question for you… If Torres/Anelka/Messi had a 2 metre head start over a defender who plays for Accrington Stanley can they outpace said defender to make it to the box, take a shot and hopefully score? In the real world you might part with a large sum of money to bet on a reasonably sure thing. Not FIFA… They might as well not have included a sprint button the good it will do you. You will in most cases miss-control and lose the ball or the opposition defender will casually run up beside you and you are rendered ball-less. Sounds fun right? So you’ve given up running and figure ‘sod it’ I’ll just pass it about a bit and play like Spain or Arsenal. Wrong! For one thing, the passing is so wayward that its genuinely shocking whether you play with assistance on, semi or completely manual. I have tried so many different combinations to see if it can make life any easier and it’s all the same. Now the other thing with the passing is that the players won’t make any runs unless they are prompted, unlike previous FIFAs, so you spend every 2 seconds pressing LB/L1… This also applies to when you are defending which is hilarious! This doesn’t help anyway… Most games I play end up one or two nil and this is hard fought for whether playing on Amateur or Legendary. If anything it is slightly easier on a higher difficulty setting as the opposition attack more which gives you fractions more of a second to miss-queue another glorious through ball down the line and out of play…

So you get near the goal by some miracle close enough to shoot… stay calm… stay composed… pick a spot… shoot… oh the keeper got it. Guess it was just unlucky… Nope. The keepers seem to be super human again which just adds to the vitriol that is probably building up inside you. Oh well lets plug on because technically this isn’t worse or any better than the previous FIFA so can’t really complain…

So, the opposition is attacking. We already covered the whole lots of fouls thing…snooze… but there is more. You can’t run and defend. Even less running! For some reason the computer opponent is awesome regardless of the difficulty setting or quality of the players. The amount of times I have had defenders just run into each other or fall over one another is far more than could be accounted for bad luck. Trying to defend at a corner is absolute madness and if you call the keeper out by holding down y/triangle then it has been known for the keeper to try to do a through ball and 9 times out of 10 puts it into the path of one of the oppositions forwards. Brilliant. And another thing… it doesn’t matter if player is Kaka or whether they are league 2 reservists, they will always be able to pull off cheeky skill moves to beat your last man. You have been warned…

Small detail that pissed me off from previous FIFA has returned in this one. Oh joy of joys! I think the referee has his own gravitational pull or secretly is a frustrated footballer. He was the fat kid. Fat kids don’t play football! Silly fat kid… Oh yeah my point. So the ball hits the referee a lot. It’s inconvenient. If you’re a fan of real football you can count on your fingers the amount of times you have seen the referee take one in the face/groin and chuckled at their rare misfortune. The key word is RARE. Stupid fucking FIFA…

Ok so the gameplay is awful… Let’s talk about the changes to regular features like manager mode. Ok so first of all everything seems to have been merged into career mode! This gives you the option of being just a player (as in be a pro on the previous versions), player manager (which gives you the options to play as just the player or the whole team before the start of a fixture) and manager mode (playing as just the team but not your virtual pro). Ingenious eh? I used to enjoy manager mode on previous incarnations as it was somewhere between champ manager and just playing a bit of FIFA. Which was fun for an obsessive compulsive like me and having the 25 best players in the world coupled with having over a billion pounds ( Wa Ha Ha!!!!!) to spend on any newer better players was awesome. Now what do you get for your manager mode buck? Sod all. In fact what you get is an annoying calendar that takes forever to get through to the fixture dates while stopping intermittently to tell you a player is tired and needs a rest or that a player is doing really well and needs to be rewarded which short of changing the captaincy every week you can do nothing about. So why bloody tell me this?! What do you want me to do FIFA????? So basically you just play games until you reach fifteen seasons and get nothing for it because there isn’t an achievement/trophy/virtual pro accomplishment. Sounds fun no?

I’ve saved the best nugget till last.

So you remember be a pro yeah? Did you ever wonder why you could never play as the goal-keeper? Well wonder no more and enter the exciting world of standing around for 8 minutes doing sweet fa. If you hold down b/circle your team will press and the opposition will never get near you and even when they do get through all you have to do is hold down y/triangle and you have the ball and can pass it out again and carry on with that lovely standing you were enjoying so much. I guess it could be interesting in online team play… once… but who in their right mind wants to do that? Who really wants to be a goal-keeper in real life? Kids dream of being a striker! Goalies are in the most part the tall kid who was set aside from the others at scool in PE because the teachers were terrified of tall on short based contact sport injuries. I digress. Its dog sex and hardly warrants all the bloody hoo ha that accompanied it on release. It’s a fucking novelty and like Billy the Bass, Flat Eric and Chico will have its fifteen minutes and fuck off.

So yeah FIFA 11. If I wasn’t an obsessive it would already have been traded in. It still might as Pro Evo is out this coming Friday and it can’t be any more frustrating, annoying, demoralising, infuriating and generally cuntish than FIFA has been to me these past few days. So if you were wondering if it might be a good idea to update to the newest version which Playstation magazine gave 10/10 (wtf!!!!!!!!!!!!) then don’t. I wouldn’t even say it is an improvement on last years and as that is most certainly not the case it is not worthy of any notable lauding and hoo rahs. I want those hours back EA! Where are they you Canadian bastards?!

Cunt/10

I also have a huge question mark as to how the major twist is going to work. One of the main motivations I have for the plot movement doesn’t actually make sense. Essentially I need a better reason for my characters to be doing what they are doing. They aren’t going to decide to fly all the way to one of the moons of Jupiter on a whim, but the reason I had them going there was frankly idiotic. All of a sudden I feel a lot less sure about the whole thing. So the question now is; do I stick with the plot that has been rolling around my head, and trust that once I get going with the actual words on the page that the issues of plot will work themselves out? Or do I take the next six days to try and come up with some other loose plot? Perhaps I could write some blood-drenched horror, or something completely non-genre. The only thing that I know for sure is that until midnight Sunday night rolls around, I probably won’t make my mind up fully until I start.

The one thing that is keeping me firm to the notion of sticking with Europa is that I remember last time I did Nano, I ditched the idea I had at the very last minute for something that seemed like a good idea but which ultimately failed to be. While I managed to stick with it through the 50k mark, by the time I wrapped up I couldn’t even be bothered to write the additional 10k that would have wrapped the plot up and given me a working first draft of a novel. It really was poor, and I knew that from about the 30k mark when I just ran into a plot hole and couldn’t find a decent way out of it.

On the other hand, if I am already getting bored with my plot and I haven’t started writing it yet, that hardly bodes much better. I only have a week to decide.

Anyway, in the last two weeks I have lost all writing ability. Don’t believe me, go read the last paragraph again. Done? And that was my third attempt at it. Last week I tried to write an obituary to Paul Gray from Slipknot for Demon Pigeon, and ended up spending two hours trying to nail one line. For the bassist from Slipknot.

And it’s not just my writing that has fallen by the wayside, the Year Of Health has taken a not insignificant nosedive over the last two weeks, and I’ve put back on four pounds. I need my mojo back, but I cannot fathom how to get it back. Hopefully my juices will reappear again, and maybe now that I have finally built my last piece of flat-pack furniture for the house, my creative aenima will return.  Of course, if you don’t hear from me again in the next two weeks, feel free to send me abusive messages. Maybe that will spur me into action.