my second anniversary of posting nonsense

I’ve not written without caffeine for a very long time. Honestly i’m not sure how well my style will fare without the super charged effluent of pulsing impulses (nice one) running through my system. It was something closer to demonic possession than an actual process. As king says, he is the vessel through which his writing, and cocaine habit flows. In my case the source of that flow is likely a monkey with a pair of symbols.

Okay, so last year, yesterday, was the second anniversary. yes i forgot it was my anniversary of writing this shit heel blog. I mean now i have my silver play button and a cosplayer girlfriend who will corroborate the stories of my abusive and morally reprehensible ways when it comes time for my fall from grace; or that was the plan at least. Not gonna lie i started at nothing and now I am several steps backwards from there.

Maybe that’s too harsh, it’s not the destination but the friends we make along the way. As such I have decided to do a Q+A session on my subreddit. Only I don't have one, hey that itself could bare examination. Okay new idea, i am going to ask myself questions and then you’re going to read the answers and think about how charismatic and off the cuff i sound. Ready? Go:

Q: When did you decide to start soiling the internet with your filth?
A: Honestly that’s kind of a hostile question right from the off, I'd like to keep things a little friendlier ....

Oh shit i’m stealing the SOPHITICATED GAMER's format he used for the guest post he wrote the other day. He’ll probably notice but for the sake of originality I need to… keep going.

Q: when did you stop referencing whatever music you were listening to while writing when you started to run out of ideas?
A: hey don’t call me, by blondie, out on my bullshit you’re meant to be my fans, god you’re a hostile lot that’s for sure. good call back.

Q: is this really the best you have to offer after two years of biweekly blog posts.
A: well biweekly is a fairly ambiguous term so on that basis I don't think the question is valid m’kay. Not really sure what you mean by that, like twice a week or one every two weeks?

Q: do you think the pretence of accosting yourself has any inherent comedic value?
A: look who’s finally getting meta.

Q: you are?
A: indeed I am. Good question!

Q: well maybe you should address the whole garbelled English thing. Is that intentional or…
A: i’d rather not talk about it. I’m not sure if I'm dyslexic or brain damaged and at this point I don't want to know.

Q: Did you just get distracted by tinder?
A: yes, one person’s bio read “i’m the most complicated person you will ever meet,” I laughed so hard I wanted to include it in my blogpost.

Q: Are you getting to a postable length blog now?
A: yeah, time to rap it up.

Well that’s all we have time for. I am a very busy man with all those things that need doing and happening when you run a media empire like my own. All I can perhaps say is: thanks for reading, it means a lot. Aus!

The SOPHITICATED GAMER's agony aunt on the subject of... i didn't read it

Urghhh. i told my friend, and inspiration, the sophit, wait i'll just copy paste, the SOPHITICATED gamer he could do like a guest post or whatever and now he wants me to post and it.... my life is so hard i just want to sit here and guzzle cheese puffs until my hands are raw from the amount of cheese soot sucking the moisture from my skin. yet hey here we are i make scarifies for your entertainment/ mental pollution. i haven't figured out a way to monetize this yet but like if you've got some food in the fridge that you don't think you'll eat before it goes off please send it to my PObox.  

without further waffle, he's the...monetize, nope. SOPHITICATED, there we go, gamer. 

DEAR AGONY AUNT / WISEST AND MOST EXPERIENCED SOPHITICATED GAMER – HOW DO I BECOME A YOUTUBER?

PROBLEM:

I HAVE A FRIEND THAT WANTS TO EARN SOME OF HIS MONEY FROM YOUTUBE BUT CAN’T MAKE HIS FIRST VIDEO. WHAT ADVICE CAN I GIVE THIS FRIEND?

ANSWER:

So there we are logging into league of legends, going through the title screen, seeing a light in the summer art’s eyes, being winked at by their butthole. The queue to champion select starts: great I’m AP SHACO.

For those that don’t play league of legends, shaco is a clown that can summon jack in the boxes. When enemy champions walk into range of these invisible jack in the boxes, they make their champion scared for a few seconds while melting their flesh from the PEW PEWdiepie. Sorry Freudian slip and we’re back on topic.

That that brings us to rule 1 from my 12 rules to lives.

RULE 1: STUDY THE MASTERS. Pewdiepie is a master youtuber. You want to avoid jealousy of your masters. This will let you have admiration, so you can contact your masters and learn from them. You can learn what they are doing that you aren’t.

And in the words of Arianna Grande, talking about her masters:

One taught me love
One taught me patience
And one taught me pain

RULE 2: DON’T play league of legends. It is so fun and frustrating and addictive it will swallow your time like having a baby

ROYAL BABY 3: But realistically your friend is a cloud headed piece of @£$! that needs to get a real job because that’s how we do it around here. My father had a job hitting milk bottles with spoons and then I took over the family business and used my engineering and business degrees to streamline the business. Now we have mechanised milk bottle and spoon hitting so that we get 150 dings a minute as opposed to the dinging by hand which you’d probably expected thirty loud ones or sixty quiet ones. Of course this depends on how good and capable your employees are, because sometimes people join with fancy degrees that simply don’t have the intelligence for milk bottle dinging. We had one person that had 14 cups of tea in one morning so I kept him behind to have a go at him, and that lazy piece of !$@£ was only dinging about twenty a minute.

ROYAL BABY 4: Remember you are dumb – stay humble. And I quote Gronk:

“GRONK IS BOSS HE IS SMARTEST. THEN PARDU WHO HAS BEEN AT COMPANY FOR SEVEN YEARS IS NEXT SMARTEST. THEN DORP WHO HAS BEEN AT COMPANY FOR THREE YEARS IS NEXT SMARTEST. YOU NEW HERE, YOU ARE DUMB”

Thank you for reading. C u next Tuesday.

https://scontent.fbrs1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t1.15752-9/69158110_375705636479440_1917693401491308544_n.jpg?_nc_cat=109&_nc_eui2=AeG_p43zgCd4_O6qosWzIykT0CYCmdvC5-OaEK772uj2YcJh5wdLQp2PT5hLXHf-tVAnFQTXDgkCxOFtD1KhrZXBqqMhpCJuDLcibnwzTPQOjw&_nc_oc=AQkLaxbc5_QcXZuAUkEYpSC7eMIHTeH5Hpi0x6csNcJIMiBrtbC4M9JazRaNLVEKCD4&_nc_ht=scontent.fbrs1-1.fna&oh=f25bd8bb33b8ee11ac5728737f0ab2a8&oe=5E0D671E

Video games turned my sweet child into a rabid dog

Why suggest video games cause people to act violently? It’s a serious topic given recent mass shootings in the United states and the discussion around it, and I feel myself straining against the format when I started musing over a discussion on it. There’s a good Wikipedia article that has collated the studies on video games and violence that lends itself to a firm rebuttal of the accusations that video-games are to blame. A polygon article (CBA to link it), published in march of 2018 talks about how effective rating systems are for limiting purchases by underage children, generally stating them to be more effective than movie ratings in preventing underage purchase.

So, then… well. Why is this still a thing? He asks suggesting by implication he yet has a theory to explain the trend. I do not, be assured, but if i muddle on long enough that might not matter.

“Video games are the most oppressed group of modern times” this is at least undeniably true. It’s harder to come as a gamer than it is as gay. Rightly so. After having been through controversies around: (deep breath) sexual themes, portrayal of gender, lgbt characters, race and countries; along with issues of addiction, online harassment, alt right associations and one game that featured “the killing of Sikhs at their most holy site” it is hard not to see video games and their players as a bunch degenerate cretins.

Video games don’t make people violent but the people who play them are bloody awful. Lets refine that statement a little, not much because I don't want people to think I'm letting up on my scorn. I’m fairly sure most people won’t defend that kind of bullshit. Let’s chance tack.

Film controversies are not listed as being of the medium in general but are organised by title which makes comparison hard (I'd actually have to do some research and that’s simply unacceptable), and some of these include minor aspects like the kingsman sequel being banned in Cambodia but misses out on some fairly major ones like the ‘triumph of the wills’ being made by Nazis, which you’know outside of gamer circles is a pretty edgy thing. The total given is 55 for films, 56 including triumph.

You know when i said that bit about games not being done by title, that was a lie or rather i hadn’t get googled it. The games industry, not including the hardware which isn’t inherently problematic, was worth 35 million, no, billion dollar $$$ in 2018. Conversely the film industry, including home entertainment is worth 136 billion. Proportionally to scale we would expect 0.257 times the controversies given the scale. 112. So where do you think games measure up? Drum roll please…. Oh, i already said it, 112 which doing some quick maths, 55*0.25 (carry the 1) 7 is 112. So it’s exactly as you’d expect. Where an industry a quarter of the size putting out double the controversy….

So where do we find an explanation for the data? A reporting bias? My method being bad? Well i don’t care really. I only set out to show why people are willing to saddle and already controversial hive of scum and villainy with yet more scorn. I feel very comfortable doing so myself and i have no gain from doing so. Simply my theory which i came up as I write this, is that there are terms of plausibility that make the idea of gamer, via their association to the medium, of being violent mass shooters a palatable idea even with evidence to the contrary. It is the 99 heinous acts that make the 100th assumed, of which you might be innocent. Not that it really matters as your reflex response to the accusation will simply be the posting of memes and another round of circle-jerking.

I have a massive boner for data and having just showered i decided to wedge in a rolling frequency chart of video game controversies. Each point is the sum of the prior five years, so the first point 1977 is the sum of 1973-1977, 1978 is 1972-1978 ect ect.

Clearly this shit show was at peak in the second half of the 2000’s and has since somewhat abated, CBA to claim statistical significance. My plan from here was to plot something entirely unrelated against the dependent variable in a scatter graph and claim causality but I have things to do with my day, a lie, so I think I'll just wrap it up here.

VR headsets ruined my sex life

Concerto for a rainy day softly plays. The gentle light of an overcast August day seeps in through breaks in the curtains as i chew a length of plastic, my imitation cigarette: itself an imitation of poverty for the 19th century artist attempting to clad their purple gowns in the washed out colours of proletariat authenticity. Nowhere in video games is the line between authenticity and the simulated more prevalent than in video games.

I’ve had the honour, no, the blessing, no… I’ve used. I like that one. I’ve used Vr headsets just a handful of times in my life: assuming that a hand can hold more than three and less than five Vr’s. I mean, I could have met a handful of elephants and had it only be the one, fetal, elephant. They gestate for 22 months, and now you’ve learned something, so this isn’t a total waste of time. How many elephant facts constitutes a handful?

Vr’s biggest limitation at the moment is that it’s hella expensive and does to hardware what a really intensive graphically complex 3-d image does to a GPU. Now if that sounds a bit too technical for you we can go back to elephant facts: Did you know that an African bush elephant weighs more than twice as much as a jungle elephant, and they weigh (a colossal) 2,700 KG. no i didn’t slip an extra Zero in there, they are just really heavy.

I punched my friends kneecaps repeatedly while playing super hot. The issue with having one move around a 3-D Space, is that if the audience’s knee caps enter the physical space that overlaps with the digital realm just where the enemies head is; there is a keen likelihood that i won’t see it the first time and won’t stop from the second to eighth due to the mind breaking immersion. Their trunks are a fusion of the nose and upper lip, if you pinch the two together you might get some impression of what being an elephant is like, but probably not.

Holy cow on a satsuma, I know this is the man draw of VR, other than people spoiling at the chance to look like a prat, but it’s dam immersive. One often forgets the fiction of the place, not in the overarching experience but in singular panicked moments that startle the reptile brain into getting it’s freak out on. Speaking of brains ours have 86 millions fibres which is good until you remember elephants have 257 million, then again elephants don’t have Vr headsets so who is really winning the evolution?

The issue with this whole piece is i have only experienced VR briefly as a guest, and as such can’t claim any specific insight. I’m not sure what actually living with the technology is like. Now just to be clear, I could have asked any of the people I know who do have VR and have chosen not to because I am lazy and not interested in the topic outside attempting use is as a vessel to discuss a species that eats specifics plants as a means to induce labour, a form of self medication that is indicative of their highly developed brains.

In summary elephants never forget but i forgot to… what did i forget again? I don’t seem to remember.

Grand theft auto 4: is doing crime worth it in the end?

If you gather a group of XXX rated hardcore videogame freaks in a room, but why would you; it might take a minute, it might take an hour, it might take all night but someone is going to blur out a racial slur.

...now loading...

...now loading…

Jesus christ, this is taking a while. I’ll go make a cup of tea.

...loading…

Oh it’s bugged out, back to the start then. Grand theft auto five warrants a full, luscious and silky review. Horns, trumpets and maybe a bass guitar for that swing slam hit. Shame i’m not doing it today, the loading times are too long and i’m not skipping steps. I’ve not reviewed a gta game since the edge of 2017 but that will by no means break my stride.

So now i need to do a check notes jokes to *checks notes* maintain a facade of spontaneity. Right.

Have you ever been driving along a busy highway only for your car to, without warning, spin out, roll, catch fire and then explode… ruining your no claims bonus and forcing you to drive a fucking micra that smells like cigarette buts and an acrid vanilla haze. This is the Grand theft auto four experience. I used to think it was just my club hands awkwardly smashing the controller as my voice broke and I realised boobies were a form of high art but have since found it to be a universal motif.

I played a lot of this game during my formative years, so take it from me when I say the cars handle like hot ass. Not that i’ve had much occasion to handle hot ass, but well, you’know.

The game is grey and dreary. Is the name of the prompt I was using to outline this paragraph, i thought it succinct enough to use as an opener. In terms of design it peak 2008 gritty washed out dreariness.. Which means none of the game’s scenery really stands out for me in any meaningful way, despite me knowing my way around town even now. It’s like learning your way around a bog, a very relatable experience for all my readers I'm sure, you crettins.

The game was kind of a pain in the ass too. It was a lot of driving, go figure, well no let me take that from the top, no? Well i will anyway, driving at triple digits along some kind of lakeshore drive while swerving in an out of traffic, such things are the prize opale of the experience but what gta4 had was traffic, more jams than a lonely grandma’s pantry and toll booths to boot. They hit the realism cue right on the nail’s head and drove it through the sternum to rupture the heart of the fun, killing it, fairly dead, not to be revived.

Well that’s if you don’t want to be shot at by pigs, which lets face it, we’re all kind of hoping for at this point. I had an officer of the law waltz into my work 5 minutes before closing.

“We caught you just in time” he said.
“Am I being detained?”
“Well you don’t close until 10 right?,”
“Don’t try and mindfuck me pig, i know my rights,”

When you do a crime in the game, any crime the popo come around and try to bust you up. This was the days before Immigration and Customs Enforcement, so the law was generally armed with low calibre weapons that gave the criminal a fighting chance rather than the modern drone strikes that level a block in baltimore twice a week. Don’t ask me to cite a source for that i made it up.

This is when the game is at its peak, the thrill of the chase, the eternal dogged pursuit that pits man against man in the game of the deadliest… game. The more you do a crime the more they send black vans and helicopters to swat you in a section what would make news editors pants pop up like a teepee. All of which is entirely freeform as set you your choice of soundtrack via the radio. The game even has the option to switch to a cinematic camera that swaps between low angle shots of the cars wheels and top down views that will almost certainly lead one to crash.

The story mission were frustrating. Yeah, that point makes itself, a lot of it was fun; but it’s the dog turds in the punch that ruins the party for all the guests, who now have roundworm: the larvae of which can cause blindness.
That being said missions and the story of the game were entirely secondary to its appeal. Weirdly enough a game called grand theft auto makes is mark with… bowling.

That’s right, you can go bowling, you can take your friends bowling and they will try and out bowl you, it’s a striking minigame that’s real show stealer, I'm split as to whether it’s revolutionary or just utterly outstanding. Niko, the umm.. Player character, can be down and out having just had the ass kicking of his life, then in a fit of pure impulse, spend the next three days bowling his life out until he plays the perfect game.

This review is getting a bit girthy so let's wrap it up with the next paragraph.

The end.

Steamy sales and Burgess shales. When it's cold, it hails and out comes the snails.

As I nibble on a pan au chocolat, piping hot and fresh from the oven, I become concerned with, another nibble, the dread baron of gaming events that has begun today, or possibly yesterday while I was out. In 1909, Burgess shale was discovered. It contained fossilised creatures from a time early in earth’s history, the Burgess shale contains many unique and bizarre specimens which science, in the intervening century and a decade, has failed to turn into a living Lazarus theme park. Representing the largest failure of frog DNA to date. This however pales in comparison to the real shale, the steam sale and it’s ongoing circus of spending memes.

Okay, so in my talking about this i am in fact drawing attention to it’s happening and benefiting gabe by doing so. Most people, and use the term loosely because I am referring to journalists, which is also fairly loose because i am referring to videogames… let’s start over. Troglodytes can content themselves with knowing the foot traffic they get from their topicality if what keeps the lights on in their subterranean swamps.

That itself is an oversimplification, but one I am willing to use because the written word with all it’s infinite combinations of corncob whiskery was not designed for nuance. Oh god i’ve invoked my mystic word of total smug. I guess we have to go deeper.

The meta discussion about that is and isn’t news, in relation to riding popular events and dwelling on community staples, like the steam sales, has been a wing of self aware troglodytes corncob whiskery since some point, i’m not really sure when, i’m not going to do any research for this paragraph so just take my word for it if you like. Or don’t, it doesn’t matter. I might be “Writing to persuade,” but like a gcse student in an english exam really i’m just trying to get through this without farting too loudly.

Right so as I was saying, the steam sales, yeah nothing really jumped out at me this year. When I was a child, I thought as a child thinks and brought things in much the same way a child does. Impulse buying is now something I consciously try and avoid, though not always successfully, I recently splurged on a reduced 9p carton of yogurt. The guilt for which is still haunting my dreams.

You see the issue is, and this is my gripe with the whole reporting on open events, that the reporting replaces having your own dumb thoughts with another tossers dumb thoughts, or worse having two sets of inane thoughts about the same thing. It doesn’t matter how many sets of babble you’ve read about the latest episode of whatever. Not in the sense of there is no intrinsic value, or that there is more meaningful things one could be doing, but that doing so isn’t additive to the experience. That’s not my opinion that’s a fact!

That being said, not all topical content is inane, there are some really good bits of media analysis out there. None of which start with “top 5 hidden gnomes in the new spiderman trailer”
I am currently refusing to look up any reviews or articles pertaining to the show I am currently watching, instead i just think about it a bunch because i am really sad, but also because I think I'm better than everyone else and have a general disdain for modern media trends.

Deep down i’d rather have spent the last page splurging out about how into this show i am, well not even that deep really because i am explicitly fucking telling you that.

Social media buzz implies we are all bees, honey bees or bumble bees it doesn’t matter. we all do our complex honey dance pointing each other towards perspective sources of nourishment. In this analogy I am a fumigator whose equipment doesn’t work and hence has had to resort to spitting phlegm and bile on the hive.

Destination E3: phantom plain

9:16am, i’ve been up for about twenty minutes. Hopefully the today’s topic will come to me as i void my bowels. It’s left me whole but broken. The curry from last night, won’t. stop. hurting. It’s been nearly at least 9 months since i finished playing metal gear 5: the phantom pain, i had planned on doing a review sooner, then again, i planned on having a readership and we both know how that turned out.

Let’s jump back in time to the 1984, big brother is everywhere, well no not really but they do have a 1984 reference…. FUCK, boring, boring review boring thing. we need a resolution not a another pissuptripewalk of cesspit effluent, such a thing is not affluence it’s tired and desperate cry of the mind yet to gorge itself on the mindfuel on morning coffee… it’s 10:05am and the goose is loose.

I want to talk about graphical comparisons on games. With E3 bearing down out neck like some demented swan snapping at our tongues. it’s time to stop taking names and start drop silky hot waxy facts. THIS IS NO LONGER ACCEPTABLE



A picture is worth a thousand words and not adding a figure for images brings back memories of my supervisors shouting at me. Here we see the greatest electronics expo had to offers. Simply : graphics are a lie and i’m here to prove it. Sure okay, that might be a fluke, one dev decided to take the weekend off or came in lit Thursday afternoon and tried to hand out his phone number to the company cat, but what matters is this is systemic.

Above we see the ground pounding action rock’em out shooter and microtransaction slagfest Player’s unknown’s battle’s ground’s. The only difference here is the white balance which i could have fixed on gimp if it wouldn’t have broken my writers flow, like a turd, in more ways the one, the goal is one long unbroken chain of grammerless mass that coils around the edge of the porcelain white and refuses to go down when flushed.

Flushed is what these graphical updates look like and therefore should be, i mean they speak for themselves or they will if you have text to speech enabled but that would be a bit too much like pivoting to video for a journalist of my integrity (my voice is annoying, i think we all knew that already.)



Look at this, all they did was make the lighting lighter, that isn’t graphics, i mean they both look pretty bad to honest but i don’t see how this is a remaster. It leaves me with a shrug. I may sound outraged, well it’s because i am. For year i’ve argued, quite rightly, that graphics don’t really matter and technical innovation is only useful in how it can be used to deliver a better experience, it ain’t a goal in itself.

Okay fine, i got got kind of excited about making shots of graphical updates look worse by lowering the resolution to shit therefor making the image redundant. The prior 513 words were a loose justification of having done so, i am blatantly willing to lie to your face in order to push some made up images to you that’ll have no bearing on the product that will be shat out in crunch and because of that this is the real E3 right here. (what is subtext?)