John Walker's Electronic House

In our seventeenth episode of Rum Doings we don’t ask the question: Who will diffuse Britain’s ticking immigration time-bomb? Instead we focus on more pressing matters: plum jam and ketchup.

Before we start, just to say, last week only one person bothered to retweet the Rum Doings new episode announcement. It’s all we ask listeners to do – just help us promote it. It’s pretty bloody sad when people can’t be bothered to do just that. So please, help out. Onto the episode…

We briefly recognise how awful the Simpsons is, before tucking into a glass of plum sake, and moving on to the dominant subject of the episode: Britain’s miserly distribution of tomato ketchup. This episode, recorded on Monday, refers to the harrowing events of the preceding Valentine’s Day. Along the way we explore the options for entertainment available at Cheddar Gorge for a remarkable bargain price!

When we finally get to the restaurant story you can enjoy Nick’s precise use of the word “niggardly“, and then join us in our celebration of British service culture.

This then moves on to the distribution of crisps on aeroplanes, volumes of tea, and a mysterious newspaper clipping from 1997.

There’s a few things we ask for in return for this present. Could you retweet about it, or find a way to tell new people to listen? And writing a review on iTunes helps us a great deal. We’d appreciate it.

To get this episode directly, right click and save here. To subscribe to Rum Doings click here, or you can find it in iTunes here.

I’ve had a couple of pieces appear on Eurogamer in the last 24 hours.

First is a retrospective of Aliens Vs. Predator Classic 2000, which manages to even be a little bit Valentine’sy. It opens like this, for instance:

So I’ve got myself in something of a situation. I find that I’m spending an increasing amount of time in the company of another who is not a gamer. In a world where everyone’s something of a gamer, even if it’s just a game of Farmville at lunchtime, or some Bejeweled on the mobile phone, this new friend plays none at all. We do not have this in common. This means a front room that houses no tangle of game controllers protruding from the television. There’s no room in the whole house possessing a heaving black box of hard drives and whirring fans. This person does not own a USB mouse. This is unfamiliar territory. I am scared.

But I can nonchalantly carry in a netbook. I’m writing this on it right now. It’s an innocent-looking Trojan laptop, a small work machine. It’s no use for gaming. It’s sneered at by the likes of Steve Jobs for its inability to have its screen touched. It is, in fairness, a glorified typewriter. But just maybe…

It continues here.

Second is a review of the new Ace Attorney game, Investigations: Miles Edgeworth. I’ve been fortunate enough to review all five of this series for Eurogamer, and while they’ve astonishingly never managed to improve a single fault with each iteration, each is still a ludicrous joy to play. They’re happiness distilled down to its purest form, then moulded into gaming form. The infectious glee is overwhelming, and it works just as well once more without even mentioning the series’ former protagonist, Phoenix Wright. That starts like this:

I can’t decide which quote to open with. It’s one of these three:

“No one gets away with committing murder in my office! No one!”

“It’s gonna r0x0rz so many b0x0rz.”

“All you have to do is arrest suspicious person after suspicious person. That’s how you eliminate crime from the streets.”

Things might be different as Edgeworth takes the helm, but this is unmistakably an Ace Attorney game. It bubbles with joy, a simmering pot of gleeful happiness. The ridiculous world of outlandish characters, crazed enthusiasm and peculiar passion continues, despite this latest game being even more heavily focused on the topic of murder.

And you can read the rest here.

A few decades back something went horribly wrong in the UK. At a certain point, as a nation, we reversed the order of priority between customer and service provider. And nothing reveals this contempt demonstrated to consumers better than the provision of ketchup.

Now we all know that the way things should work is the volume of ketchup available being inversely proportional to the poshness of the establishment. Cheap and cheerful cafes should have a big bottle of the stuff available on the table. Then as you get more posh the amount drops down. A reasonably nice pub chain will, for instance, give you a ramekin dish filled with red sauce. Go from chain to restaurant and now the ramekin is only leant to you momentarily, for you to teaspoon as much onto your plate as you feel you can get away with. (I’ve declared no shame at this point, and will gladly empty it out – they’ve got more.) Next rung is they maintain complete control of the ketchup distribution, titrating a single millilitre of it onto your plate for you. Then above that requesting ketchup results in your being asked to leave.

That’s all how we expect it to be in the lunatic version of society we should concede to accept. This is not something the UK is capable of adhering to. Because in the UK ketchup is a rare commodity, brought in by vast merchant ships from distant lands, traded for gold and precious jewels. It is an exotic elixir so rare and unusual that it must be reserved as an offering to the gods, or for visiting kings of neighbouring empires. We must preserve our precious ketchup resources, and we must ensure that no customer is able to dip their chips in more than half a teaspoon’s worth, distributed in tiny plastic sachets that can only be opened using teeth.

Which is strange, because when you go into supermarkets they seem to sell enormous containers of it for insignificant amounts of money. This is indeed quite a mystery.

It is with all this in mind that I say: bring your own ketchup to the Hillside Cottage in Cheddar Gorge.

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I wrote this piece about Yo Gabba Gabba a few months ago as a spec for something else that didn’t happen. So if you are a super-high-powered editor/publisher who wants writing about TV like the below, do get in touch. That would be nice.

The cruellest thing that can happen to any children’s television programme is its ironic adoption by the student classes. Teens and twenty-somethings oh-so-knowingly put up posters of popular pre-school characters, but, wait for it, here they’re smoking a spliff, or taking a dump! How astonishingly clever and, let’s just say it, satirical. The system, the Man, is truly smashed to bits like someone took a bulldozer to a Sylvanian Families collection.

These wretched people misunderstand any magical programme they touch, ruining the gentle, repetitive loveliness of everything from The Magic Roundabout to the Teletubbies, Bagpuss to Bob The Builder. But this isn’t to say that adults shouldn’t be able to sit and enjoy the output of channels like CBeebies or Nick Jr. If capable of watching them without becoming enraged by the numbers of arms a presenter may possess, there’s much to be appreciated on exactly the level the creators intended. But sadly any programme that doesn’t treat its child audience as plankton, bothering to work hard at being thoughtful and involved, seems to be subsumed by the weed-addled idiots.

There is, however, one programme that knows exactly what the ironic pissants will do to it before they let loose their first nasally snort. One that has them beat from the start. Yo Gabba Gabba is the creation of indie hipsters Christian Jacobs and Scott Schultz, and is quite possibly the most perfect under-five’s television programme if you don’t count Sesame Street.

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Hello. This would be episode 16 of Rum Doings. We’re not afraid to not discuss the subjects that aren’t topical, and such it is that we’re not discussing the true meaning of Christmas.

Instead we begin with a celebration of oat milk, whatever on Earth it might be. First the carton is dissected, and then the insides are consumed. Will we like it? Will we paw at our tongues?

Fond memories of the daily porridge man arise, before we knuckle down to this week’s theme: a discussion of The Rules. This causes conversation about how to pronounce clip-art, pause buttons at the cinema, cats drinking from toilets, boobies, the pleasure of being rained on, hole digging, Dick and Dom In Da Bungalow jokes, and John’s rather heartwarming rules for bravery.

Could you help out? There’s a few things we ask for in return for this present. Could you retweet about it, or find a way to tell new people to listen? And writing a review on iTunes helps us a great deal. We’d appreciate it.

To get this episode directly, right click and save here. To subscribe to Rum Doings click here, or you can find it in iTunes here.

It’s the fifteenth episode. They said it would never last this long. This “they” being the people who knew we were going to try to drink Tesco Value W-hite Rum.

This week not under discussion is the matter: has the iPad lived up to the media hype? So instead we talk about John’s loss of nomenclature, and then almost kill ourselves with a frighteningly awful liquid.

This week’s episode is mostly dictated by the commands of one “Royston”, who left a comment on episode 13 in which he listed subjects he would like to hear discussed. Somehow missing his opening entry, “Wales”, we otherwise followed his instructions. Which were:

St Wilgefortis
Battlestar Galactica Action Figures
Sufjan Stevens
Favoured Condiments

Which pretty much sees us through. It leads us toward discussions of decaffeinated horrors and fishfingers, and that’s us done.

We’d love it if you passed this link on, told friends, recommended us in forum threads, pre-loaded it on mp3 players and then handed them out to all your family, and so on. Also, if you would, write us a review on horrible, horrible iTunes. That would be splendid.

To get this episode directly, right click and save here. To subscribe to Rum Doings click here, or you can find it in iTunes here.

As was passed around the internets yesterday, Bill Watterson has done a rare interview with Cleveland.com, of all places, to mark fifteen years since he stopped drawing Calvin & Hobbes.

Watterson’s an odd and excellent chap. Calvin & Hobbes was unquestionably the greatest daily strip cartoon in the last fifty years (I really cannot think of anything this could be challenged by), and made more excellent by his refusal to merchandise the strip. So thankfully we never saw Calvin grinning on birthday cards, nor, as Watterson once wrote, had the reality of Hobbes decided for us by a stuffed toy. Instead we of course had Calvin pissing on VW logos, and horrible knock-off t-shirts of, for some reason, Calvin pulling one particular face. But never anything official. C&H remained pure in its form, a comic strip printed in newspapers, then reprinted in books.

Watterson’s motivations for stopping the comic have changed over the last decade and a half. At the time he made it perfectly clear he was quitting because it was the only way to stop the syndicate from merchandising the strip. He called their bluff. Now he says he had said all there was to say, and it had been time to end before it became repetitive or disliked. Whichever is the case, while I would dearly love for there to be new strips to read, I think he’s right that it was best to end at its peak. The idea that Calvin & Hobbes might have gone on to become as tired and unlikeable as so many of the daily strips is too terrible to bear.

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I have a piece up on Eurogamer today looking back at the Nintendo DS. Three and a half years ago I wrote this ‘love letter’ to the DS, celebrating why it was such a strange and interesting platform for gaming, exploring the oddities it was producing, revelling in the glee this produced. Time has passed, things have changed.

So I’ve taken the ‘love letter’ idea more literally this time. It’s a mixture of difficult letter to the console, and article discussing the rise and decline of the games available. I’m pleased with how it’s worked out. It’s also appropriately odd. It begins:

“DS, we have to talk. I’m sorry that I’m doing this in a letter rather than face to face, but I need to express all my thoughts and feelings carefully. I need to make sure you understand. I need you to know that I still love you, I’ve always loved you, but something is wrong.

Remember that love letter I wrote you in 2006? We’d been together for a year and I’d never felt so happy. We were still getting to know one another even then, and you had that ability to constantly surprise me. Every time I thought I knew all about you, you’d pull out another twist, another wonderful talent. Of course we knew this wouldn’t last, but then, at that time, it felt like forever.

In August 2006 I wrote a piece of Eurogamer about my unbridled love for the DS. The console had been out for just over a year and what was happening was extraordinary. While the DS was of course home to streams of rubbish, it was also the place to go for your dose of strange. Many spectacularly odd games, ideas that seemed born of fever dreams and lunatics’ fantasies.

It was the memory one of these games this week that suddenly brought the reality of my relationship with the DS crashing down on me. I remembered Rub Rabbits.

Oh, remember that year. We were always hand in hand, laughing, playing. There was so much laughter. The games weren’t always brilliant, but it was about us, how we interacted, how we learned about each other. Those hours and hours chatting with Phoenix Wright. The strange adventures, exploring with Another Code. Painting together with Kirby: Canvas Curse. It was like nothing else. We were young, we had no responsibilities, people didn’t understand us. And we didn’t care.”

It continues here.

Persisting in this new weekly habit, Rum Doings Episode 14 certainly doesn’t discuss its chosen topic, What Should We Do About The Wheeliebin? It’s with troubling enthusiasm that we begin this latest episode, despite the blatant lack of rum in our hands. Your rules, we don’t play by them. This week our drink is, instead, honeybush tea.

Things we do talk about include the paradoxical anomaly that is BBC 1’s Outnumbered, why Russell Davies doesn’t deserve his “T”, the plot holes in Press Gang, obviousness in writing, and ask why can’t people enjoy their superpowers? There’s revelations of Michael Moore, and then of course the discussion we’ve all be expecting: who should be the next Archbishop of Canterbury.

Then, at long last, Nick’s brief lecture on Derrida. Which is genuinely our most requested topic.

We’d love it if you passed this link on, told friends, recommended us in forum threads, graffitied the URL on the sides of houses, and so on. (Don’t actually graffiti the sides of houses.) Also, if you would, write us a review on horrible, horrible iTunes. That would be splendid.

To get this episode directly, right click and save here. To subscribe to Rum Doings click here, or you can find it in iTunes here.

Because TV so strangely doesn’t understand our Earth years, the US lot beginning in September and ending in May, and the UK and AU lot starting and finishing whenever it feels like it, I couldn’t find a way to do a “Best of 2009” style thing for it. Because TV from this time last year feels like it’s from the most ancient of pasts. That’s – what – almost three seasons of Survivor ago! Imagine it. So here’s what TV is up to. Alphabetically. Oh good grief, I only got to E. So no, I don’t watch all these shows every day. Lots of them finished their runs already. I watch two or three programmes a day (which I’d say would be about average), banking up lots of shows for a day off maybe, or a way to fill a long train journey. It’s okay. It’s not as weird as it looks. The weird part is how I’ve spent so long writing about them.

Archer – FX

After an enormous post-pilot hiatus, Archer finally starts its series proper. It’s the latest from Adam Reed (Sealab 2021, Space Ghost Coast To Coast), and follows the formula: fast-paced adult cartoon with little interest in coherence or human decency. On FX rather than Cartoon Network, it frees things up to be a little ruder, swearier, and more callous. And it works well. The brilliantly droll Jon Benjamin (Dr. Katz’s Ben) plays Archer, a secret agent of sorts, who isn’t quite incompetent but more simply hateful. His mother is voiced by Jessica Walter (Arrested Development’s Lucille), along with Aisha Tyler (CSI, I guess), the compellingly lovely Judy Greer (I loved her in the very short-lived Miss Guided), and SNL’s Chris Parnell. Two episodes in it’s unsurprisingly great, as you’d expect from Reed, and really quite fantastically wrong too.

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