John Walker's Electronic House

Well here we are then.

Updating WordPress from 1.2 to 1.5 turned out to be a bit more of a haul than expected. It also demolished all that had gone before, including the fine Mr Richard Cobbett’s lovely CSS. Not having a clue how to get it back, I decided it was time for a change.

And in changing, I appear to have caught up with a number of things.

– First off, there’s now titles to entries. Not a huge deal, but it makes navigation much easier. I’ve only bothered to title the stuff that appears on the front page.

– Then there’s Categories. This means if you’re looking for, say, a review entry, it’ll be much easier to get hold of. I’ll go back through at some point and file the older posts.

– And after a few pesters recently, I believe I’m now RSSsy. Still no idea what this actually is, but I do seem capable of it.

Huge thanks to Martin for all the help and patience and fixing of mistakes this evening. Do let me know any comments or criticisms about the new look. I’m going to fix the “boring” – Kieron Gillen, 2005, banner soon too.

I went to see a GP on Friday, after finally growing fed up of the constant pain in my left little finger. For the last few months, I have found that bending my left elbow at all causes pins and needles to build in the finger instantly, and if the arm is not frequently straightened fully, it quickly becomes painful. Obviously when writing, and indeed when existing at all, the left arm needs to bend halfway down, so this is rather irritating.

I also decided it was about time to try again with my right knee, which if not clicked about once a minute develops a horrible ache. This is the bane of my life, meaning I spend about 25% of my time ensuring I have enough space to straighten my leg to feel the satiating click. Pub tables are frequently peaked under to find a route through which the limb can stretch, planes and trains need to provide me with aisle seats if journeys are not to be absolute torture, and I will try to go to the cinema at off-peak times so that I can put my leg over the chair in front. Indeed, sat at this desk where I spend half my life, my right leg is not underneath, but sticking out the side so it can be frequently clunked into submission. It’s funny how all this fuss has become something I live with, to the point where I’d forgotten it was a fault worth addressing. I remember mentioning it to a GP once when a teenager, and he said, “Yes, it clicks. I don’t know why,” which was just fabulous. I think I grew resigned to it then.

So Friday’s visit about the increasingly uncomfortable elbow afforded me the opportunity to mention the knee as well. The idea that they might be connected, for reasons I cannot fathom, had never occurred to me. The doctor dismissed RSI immediately, and recognised that it was something in the elbow plucking at my ulna nerve – the nerve that provides feeling in the little finger, and half of the ring finger. He held my elbow and then bent and straightened my arm, feeling the clunk with each straightening. And then suddenly his interest appeared piqued. He took hold of my fingers and bent them backward. This is no terrible thing – my fingers are able to bend backward until they are parallel with the back of my hand – it’s quite disgusting for the uninitiated, but a source of novelty joy for me. The fingers on both hands are able, without aid, to bend backward far enough to appear as if… oh, it’s much easier if I just show you.

The natural backward-curve. About half a foot away from the stuff in the background, despite looking as if it’s resting on them.

The extent to which my fingers can bend back on themselves. Loses nothing in the flattening of a photograph : )

But this has only ever been a pub trick – a way to scare the squeamish. My fingers do all manner of other disgusting tricks – the knuckles so adequately demonstrated as bending equally in both directions in the photo also bend disturbingly on the x-axis, meaning my hands can sort of fold in half lengthways as well. This is brilliant for reaching inside Pringles tubes and similar, as they bend in half to become cylindrical. This is, I think, far more disgusting when wobbled about in front of people. Which is what it’s really all about. In fact, the even joints in each finger bend amusingly, allowing me to contort my hands into all manner of awful positions. And the backward cupping makes for a neat trick while juggling.

So the doctor was bending my fingers about, and then asked me to lie on the bench and began trying similar experiments with my legs. Now, I’ve always been able to put my toes to my mouth – a common enough trick amongst flexible girls, so something I’ve never thought much of. I can get my heel to my forehead, in fact, but have little use for this. Again, it never occurred to me that this might be at all unusual in an overweight male.

And then he called me “fascinating”. Something with which I’m sure people would be hard-pushed to disagree. It turns out I have ‘Hypermobility Syndrome’.

This means little more than that most of the joints in my body don’t know when to stop. And it’s of little cause for concern – it generally cures itself with age. But at worst, it can cause secondary arthritis, and with the trapped ulna nerve, and the accompanying pain, I’m being referred to a rheumatologist for Experiments.

It’s a funny thing, how what you’re used to is what you assume to be normal. I remember once my mum exclaiming in disgust at how my toes were pointing upward with my feet flat on the floor – just a normal fiddly thing for me. I ignored it then. And it’s only this weekend that I’ve learned it’s not normal for your wrist to bend past a right angle from your arm in either direction. Mine always have – I just thought all of them did that. And as I write this, I remember explaining to a chiropractor how if I didn’t click the vertebrae in my neck like this, “CRACK-ACK-ACK-ICK-ACK” and like this, “CRICK-ICK-ACK-ACK-ICK-ACK”, about once an hour, I get nasty headaches. He said to me looking slightly unnerved, “You’re neck isn’t meant to bend that far.” For some reason neither of us thought any more of it.

I asked the doctor if perhaps I ought to be in the circus. He didn’t think it was necessary. But I realise that were my back to demonstrate this ability (and it doesn’t to any interesting extent (so for all you foul people who were thinking that, no, absolutely not)) I would probably qualify as the “Indian Rubber Man” of days past.

So now I look forward to discovering what other joint-based things I can do that others can’t, and add them to my list of new-found super powers.

I can’t remember what the context was now, but a long while back in Gamer I made a call for someone to invent the ‘second-person perspective’ game. Obviously I was being flippant, but now someone has created it:

Select Parks’ Julian Oliver has created something which doesn’t appear to have a given name. Apparently he’s been struggling with the notion for years himself, although unlike me, he took it beyond a stupid joke, and unlike me, is enormously skilled in all sorts of ways, and has made a demo of his idea.

“The first person perspective has always been priveledged with the pointillism (or synchronicity) of a physiology that travels with the will in some shape or form, “I act from where I perceive” and “I am on the inside looking out”. In this little experiment however, you are on the outside looking in, and to my great amusement, it’s a complete and total pain in the arse.”

Apparently the aim is to shoot yourself in order to survive, which sounds… um… like shooting the enemy to survive, surely? I don’t know – I’m just so proud that others take stupid ideas to such beautiful lengths.

It’s time for a few scientific experiments.

3) Stay with your back against the wall. This time, without the aid of a mirror, try and look at your own face.

It is a review, I promise. Of the new Tenchu ninja-em-up for PS2. Walker branches out.

Fascinating comments thread on this one. I appear to have managed to piss off the vociferous Eurogamer readership with everything I’ve written so far. But this time they seem especially cross.

There’s a peculiar thing about adventure game reviews. Aside from the tedious inevitability of the mainstream press attempting some widespread analysis of the entire genre, there comes alongside them the frothing insanity of the adventure gaming specialist press. These poor starving beings wander through their lives wraith-like, long gaunt faces, bony fingers clasping with a rigor mortis grip around any release that might feature some notion of pointing and clicking. Letting these people review adventure games is like letting junkies review heroin. However cut the purity might be, however poor quality, whatever diseases might worm through their bodies as a result of playing, dammit man, it’s a hit. Give it a 10.

Still Life review up on Eurogamer. What I’m really hoping for is a massive electronic war with Just Adventure. They’d all come rushing in, stabbing everyone with the spikey As they give everything.

So, I want to tell you about my life. I’ll pick, oh, let’s say Thursday, and talk you through it.

I get up at about 7.30am, and jump in the shower. Coffee is made, thrown in a travel mug, and I get in the car. DVDs are dropped back at the rental shop (because I don’t want to be barred from both video stores in Bath), and then I drive for twenty minutes around a town I’ve lived in or near for three years trying to find a route through the crazyman one way logic problem of Bath’s streets until I can get to the road with the Odeon on it. (Anyone who lives in Bath now thinks: ‘Um, you just drive onto it.’ Those people are witches). I manage it just in time to pick up Kieron, and then we drive to Stansted airport.

We don’t fly anywhere, that’s not why we go there. We just go there to have games presented to us before getting into a coach and being driven to a mystery location containing a giant stately home in the beautiful green countryside. Here we have an incredibly nice buffet lunch with barbecued meats of every variety. We drink green orange juice and red or blue water, and sit with the very most strange of games journalists, who all fawn over Kieron, asking if they can just, just maybe, touch his hand so their lame foot may be healed.

We meet with Craig, and then after lunch are surprised by a large group of men and women dressed in combats, faces, arms and chests smeared in camo, who run into the room and tell us all to put combats on. They then shout at us until we all go outside, in our correct groups, as designated by the number on the caps we’re forced to wear, and not the colour of the cap. Red is human, yellow is biomek, black is mutant. As you’re probably well aware.

Outside, we are then shouted at by incredibly cute girls putting on cross voices.

Divided up, Kieron (human) goes off with the number 5s, while as 2s, Craig (human) and I (mutant) go in the other direction.

At this point, it’s probably quite important to point out how some people are Cap People, and other people are not. For instance, me:

Variously described as “handsome” (thank goodness for Jim), “a Serbian war criminal” (cheers Stu) and “The right-wing nutcase we always knew you were” (from dearest, dearest Alec, who just keeps finding that joke funny, bless him), I think it’s safe to say that I’m… not a Cap Person.

Craig, however:

is clearly of the Cap People. The natural smile, and long, girly hair, means that he looks as pretty as a peach in anything.

And Kieron:

Well, he’s grateful for the chance to go outside and spend time with the grown ups.

So Craig and I will go to the quad bikes and inflatable outdoor indoor quasar first of all.

When we are done there, terrfied by the shouting, insane, shouting, shouting German man

and the woefully over-confident guy from Boomtown, we move on to the hovercrafts.

Hovercraft? Witchcraft, more like. More difficult to steer than my Fiat Punto, and with a thumb-twitch cut-off cord, they are quite impossible to control, and Craig is a demon, spawned upon this earth in the approximate form of a human. Here we also drive things called ‘Argos’, which devastatingly is pronounced “Arr-goes”, and not like the laminated halls of plastic misery-queues. (I’m sorry, Greek who?). These are not controlled by the two metal levers that must be pulled up and down willynilly while the ludicrous six-wheeled metal crate lurches about in its own choice of direction, which is inevitably through the thick trunks of trees.

This rubbish finished, we move on to pure, sweet joy – vehicles formed from the very tears of metallic angels: Little buggies that go everso, everso fast.

A fool might think it enough for us to just drive these beasts at hairy speeds around the large grass track. Sad fool. The only way for this experience to be complete is for two teams of enemy races to be armed with semi-automatic paintball guns, who must fire their little balls of emulsion-based death at you as you hurtle past their cowardly nests.

All finished, we head back to the vast, astonishing house/hotel, and are told that the cheating human scum cheated their way to a cheat-based victory, and then Kieron and I drive back via our own unique and patented route. This involves my ignoring Kieron’s correct suggestion of which way to get onto the M25, and immediately realising that we’re facing the wrong circumference of a big, slow circle. No matter, we just drive the nine miles to the next junction and turn around. Of course, we don’t drive those nine miles, but instead move at a speed only slightly faster than if we just allow the surface of the earth to pass beneath our wheels, because everyone, and I mean everyone, wants to get a big old nice slow gawp of the burned out winnebago that’s blocking all three lanes of the motorway in the other direction. So we don’t turn back and join the carpark on the other side of the barrier, but instead take a scenic route through the countryside, taking us back to the same junction where I made that one stupid decision one hour previously. Hours later I drop Kieron off in Bristol, and then get home, watch a couple of episodes of Scrubs, and get myself to bed.

That’s pretty much a Thursday for me. It normally means I really can’t wait for the weekend for all this crazy work to be over.

(Full-sized pictures, with a load others, here)

“Hello misses.”

Hello indeed. This glorious legend represents the very first spoken words in RPG-lite Restricted Area, (should you be playing as one of the two available female characters). Typos are not the be-all and end-all of civilisation (that honour goes to incorrectly used apostrophes), but their inclusion is never a good sign. Opening with one – that achieves ‘omen’ status.

Well, it would seem that I am over on Eurogamer. Lovely news.

Because, in all I do, I am just a shallow shadowy imitation of Kieron Gillen, I thought I’d copy his promotional ways with the above.

Huge thanks to Landlord Hicks for having linked me to the Mirror Mask trailer:

I saw it for the first time last night, not recognising the name (despite having perused the illustrated script in Waterstones, gooey-eyed staring at the art of Dave McKean), and not knowing what to expect. Some ghastly hyperbole about the Wizard of Oz immediately worried me, but then the pictures appeared. It was Dave McKean’s illustrations, but moving, alive. I sat stock-still, shivers filling my neck and back, my jaw stupidly open throughout, and by the end a fat tear had spilled from each eye. At a trailer.

In the company I keep, names like Neil Gaimen are well worn and too easy. But for me, a person who hasn’t read Sandman, he’s something new, and someone I’ve only explored in his utterly wonderful children’s books. The Wolves In The Walls is how all children’s books should be written. The ad bumph says it all:

“Lucy is sure there are Wolves living in the walls of her house, but her family doesn’t believe her.

Then one day, the wolves come out…”

Gaimen’s understanding of glee, that the macabre delights, and the brilliant use of jam to replace blood, is fantastic. But what made me fall in love with the book was the striking nature of the McKean’s illustrations. A combination of hand drawn cartoons photographic collage, and… something that might be pastel, but I’m not sure, creates something completely other. As I write, Kieron’s firing off names of other McKean/Gaimen books I should already have read – the joy is, I still have them to read.

So yes, I’m Mr New To All This, but that only strengthens the grip this Mirror Mask promo has on me. McKean’s vision is imagination in pictures. Imagination is often lazily translated into “unusual” or “not reality”. Imagination is reality and unreality combined, history and potential given no constrictions and set free. And that’s what this trailer shows. If the film is this good, it will be all-consumingly wondrous. If it’s not, and I mean this, then I still have the trailer.

That this is coming from the last remaining tendrils of the Jim Henson company is wonderful. It may be their bowing out. There’s a reason why Muppet movies always make me cry like an idiot: because Henson understood imagination. Not “ways to make kids think”, but ways to paint the screen with wonder. The Labyrinth may suffer from Bowie’s haircut and ominous lycra bulges, but it remains visually beautiful. It was care and love and passion focused into creative energy. As his wretched offspring prostitute their father’s work for every last cent they can strangle out, there does seem to be some of Henson’s magic left in the parts that haven’t been sold to Disney or whoever else wrote the biggest cheque.

Imagination means so much to anyone worth knowing. It’s the dividing line between ‘adults’ and ‘grown ups’. Anyone who allows themselves the notion of having finished their journey to the point where they feel secure to say that they have ‘grown up’ has shed their imagination. They’ve lost sight of the joys of impossible potential and unreal desires. As the education system drains the last vestiges of imaginative teaching and teaching imagination from its curricula, and society condemns the dreamer, seeing something so utterly, compellingly beautiful as this little film advert has wrapped my heart in blankets.

I’m often asked to justify my love for the PC game The Longest Journey. Those who play it as a result of my endless promotion quickly discover the terrible point-n-click puzzles, and often become infuriated with my deception. I’ve tried so many times to articulate what it is about the game that raises it above such niggles, that makes it so very special and worthy of such tireless celebration. It’s the above. It’s that love of imagination, and the desire to fall into its deep volcano. The article linked just above is one stab I’ve had at attempting to explain this.

Today has been Anxiety Day.

It’s been a while since I’ve had one this intense – obviously with anxiety disorder (it’s so great to have a disorder – if you don’t have one, you really do, you’ve just not identified it yet) there’s the general lunatic worrying accompanying every waking moment – but today has been a day when it’s all bubbled over the surface.

It’s been an odd week. Lots of stuff. The reaction to that shooting really upset me as well – especially seeing the hateful comments even here. While I’ve had really valuable conversations with people about why they believe the policemen’s actions to be justified, those have been with people of the decency and intelligence to not dismiss a human life away because he didn’t react perfectly in a moment of panic. Watching a nation compromise reality down until a baggy coat is a valid death warrant depresses me greatly. Hearing the vocabulary of the nation take on the vocabulary of those who attack is devastating. The Sun’s headline yesterday (below) really hurt me – such a vicious, hateful and utterly despicable comment to make even were the dead man a terrorist. That he was not I hope will hasten Rebecka Wade’s long-necessary resignation. The headline from the Express, however, is the one that’s worried me far more. The words “[they shall] be shown no mercy” are the words of Al Quaeda. And there they are, on the front pages of our newspapers. As the police shoot to kill those who intend to kill, our vocabulary becomes that of those from whom we wish to distinguish ourselves. I wish that ours was a response of mercy. I wish our papers proudly boasted, “They shall be shown mercy.”

Anxiety Day (back there again) makes every conversation ludicrous. No matter the subject, I can’t say anything without deciding that it’s been misinterpreted, and then apologising for the possible misinterpretation, which of course didn’t happen. Which then confuses the person to whom I’m talking no end, and leaves me trying to explain what I meant, which is very much like trying to untangle a spilled pool of wool with an angry cat. I become so entangled in what I’ve said, what I’ve not said, what I think the other person might think I’ve said, what I’m sure I should have said that would have made it understood and if I say it now maybe it will be so I do but out loud it turns out to be possibly the stupidest thing I could possibly say and now I have to try and explain why I said that and what it was I thought they might have thought I said in the first place and how I then thought that that meant that they thought that I thought that they thought I had said the opposite of what I meant and so I say again what I originally meant but it still doesn’t make sense because it’s the product of anxiety and not rational thought that can be articulated out loud to someone else and so I apologise for it and worry about how I’m going to say all of that…

That’s the inside of my head.

Apologies and thank you if you’re one of those who has encountered me today.

I’m going through one of my 3WK phases again. It’s an internet underground radio station, that acts as my joint-leading source for discovering new music. (The other is Matthew George via ICQ. Kieron, you’ve slipped into a poor second place – tsk). The joy of the station is the constant necessity to task-switch from whatever I’m doing to see the name of the band currently playing, and make note of it in a permanently open Notepad window for future seekage. Today I have already listed:

decomposure / disconnect / at home and unaffected / unschooled

sufjan stevens / chicago / illinois / asthmatic kitty

And it’s only just gone 11am.

I hoover up new bands with an insatiable greed, and broad remit. 3WK is an excellent means to discover such newness (and also excellent people, fighting hard against the despicable DMCA rulings that make hosting such a station near-impossible – it’s only a meagre $10 a month for the pleasure of the high-bandwidth connection), broadcasting bands under the meaningless label of “indie”, which is a shorthand way of saying, “not playing the same old plastic-coated shit you hear everywhere else”. So in an hour you can discover eight new bands whose albums are now required if life is to remain liveable, and also that the new System of a Down stuff is quite extraordinary and actually does deserve to be on the station despite your initial “what on earth are they doing playing that“, while every Elliot Smith track you’ve ever heard is remarkable and it sucks that he’s dead and how come you only own Figure 8?

The other great pleasure is following the links to band’s sites. The air is so much fresher outside of the Big 4’s strongest influence. Wanting to learn more about the best girl-noise I’ve heard in forever, I discovered that Dixie Dirt are giving away their first album for free download. So pleased was I that I bought their new album for 8 pounds (anyone know why WordPress can’t cope with pound signs?) via their site. This is how it should and does work.

One of the musicians in this morning’s collection, Decomposure, has given me an extra treat – a term for describing the sorts of Christians who make me want to investigate genocide: “opposite-day Christianity”.

From the song ‘Disconnected’:

The Jesus i know had a nice home filled with stuff he worked hard to own
The Jesus i know saw those alone and sad and turned them out into the cold
The Jesus i know put business over spirit and soul – buy more, there’s no such thing as too much greed
The Jesus i know lobbied the government so his teachings could be enforced properly

i’ve got a line direct to heaven that sends me all i need
and there’s no disconnect, i’m always right because i’ve got god with me
your words have no effect, i’m better and it’s clear to see
you’ve got a twig stuck in your eye, the god i know is on my side
again.

In response to some reviewers’ accusations that the song is anti-Christian, he writes:

“I’m a Christian. i’m not going to say too much about the tenets of what i believe, or even attempt to justify to you why i believe it, but i do believe it, even the crazy stuff that might sound like unicorns and wizards. And no, believing one thing that seems irrational does not automatically make me talk to my toes or push a baby carriage full of soup cans and cheerily doff a dead cat to other nervous pedestrians. Like almost everything, it’s something with a lot of components that i’ll probably never figure out completely, never mind implement perfectly, and what i’ve got is hard to sum up in a couple sentences without overgeneralizing.”

I like that. More importantly, the music is experimental and interesting. And furthermore, in the post.