Merry Christmas or whichever winter light festival you and your loved ones choose to celebrate, and a Very Happy New Year, dear Hypothetical Audience, see you all in 2019 to continue our adventures!
—Ndro
Merry Christmas or whichever winter light festival you and your loved ones choose to celebrate, and a Very Happy New Year, dear Hypothetical Audience, see you all in 2019 to continue our adventures!
—Ndro
Have you ever noticed how much odd crap is ascribed to being left-handed, Hypothetical Audience? I sure have, by virtue of being left-handed all my life (at least as far as I know), and I can tell you the amount of things it’s assumed I can and can’t do, or must have to do differently, based on handedness alone by people of the alternate persuasion is vast. In both reality and fiction these range from the every day mundane, such as needing special scissors with the blades swapped around, to the oddly specific, like only a left-handed could have committed a murder because they can only hold knives in one specific hand. It’s a very strange bit of collective ignorance that afflicts a surprisingly large number people and one that’s probably worth commenting upon.
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The internet is a curious place, Hypothetical Audience, especially how its effected entertainment. If you’d told anyone a decade ago that watching videos of someone playing video games and talking over them would be not only a popular mode of passing the time for millions, but also a way people could make a living, most would likely laugh at you, and the odd one who didn’t would likely say “Well that’s clearly inspired by Mystery Science Theatre.” I am talking, of course, about the world of Lets Plays. You literally can’t browse YouTube without tripping over people trying to get their Warhol-15 minutes by playing games for everyone else’s entertainment (which was literally 15 minutes relaively recently, as that was the maximum video length at one point). Like a lot of people, I watch a few of these guys, and am equally annoyed by a few others, so thought I’d share my thoughts on the subject with you guys.
Last week I embarked upon a brief aside into my professional world of Graphic Design, dear Hypothetical Audience, by casting a critical eye over the web design at the Guardian, and to follow up I’ve decided to talk a bit about skeuomorphism and the recent trends for “flat design” in the tech areas in recent years. So everyone’s up to speed, skeuomorphism is essentially when something has been designed to resemble something else, usually meaning a device replicates the look of a previous object that fulfilled the same roll. A brilliant example, and one I. going to talk more about, would be computer note taking programmes that have lined paper textures to emulate the note pad you would have used to have owned. They were incredibly populer towards the end of the twentieth century and whilst have been on something of a decline the last few years are still very much with us.
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Terribly sorry about missing last week, had a busy weekend punctuated by a bout of the dreaded lurgi, so didn’t really have the time not inclination to write anything. Could have sworn I’d scheduled a General Failure, but apparently not. Normal service resumes now! No, not now, then!
While I mostly fill my internet space with nerdy ramblings of varying consequence, dear Hypothetical Audience, out there in the horrible, depressing meat space we all occupy known as reality I am a Graphic Designer by trade, specifically one trained in layouting and typography. Given how we are pretty much surrounded by items of design, it’s pretty hrd to switch off the senses hammered into by your training in the creative industries, meaning you constantly analyse the world around you. To that end, I’ve decided to spend the next couple-or-so blogs talking about the world of Graphic Design. This week I thought I’d look at The Guardian’s new website. After about a year and a half of “beta” appearances randomly throughout the site it finally became the norm a couple of weeks ago, and if I’m honest, it’s not that great. I don’t mean it in a “They Changed It, It Sucks, Rabble Rabble” way either, some of the design decisions are ones I don’t particularly understand, and really don’t gel well with a major national and international news source.
Early last month over in Las Vegas, USA, the Consumer Electronics Show happened, allowing tech luminaries to hawk their latest goods to the world. I find this time of year fascinating, not generally because of what the big corporations bring to the table, because that is often the same old stuff updated for the latest cycle. No, what always interests me the most, dear Hypothetical Audience, is all the odd and/or crazy crap the smaller companies show off. Every year the various fringe companies seem to want to top one another for weirdness vaguely relating to whatever tech trend was going around the office a few months previous (well, that and fakes of big name products but thats a post for another time). This year it seems home automation is the buzz word du jour, and we’ve had a veritable glut of random items that are designed to integrate into the “Internet of Things” idea that’s been floating about for the last few years, all usually with the “Smart” prefix attached. Which is usually an indication that the device performs a task that doesn’t need to be smart at all.
So, now I’ve gotten the angry political satire out of my system, for at least the time being anyway, I thought this week we’d go back to old staples and talk about the state of video gaming today. Always good to have a routine back up, eh hypothetical audience? Anyway, this month gaming press luminary Joystiq declared that it was to stop issuing scored reviews of new games in favour of adding a summary of key points to the end of each piece. The logic behind this was to both do away with the awful “8.8” thing that blights gamer culture, but also to do away with their role in Metacritic-style aggregators. The response was mixed, to say the least, but has rather conveniently brought back to the forefront an issue I feel affects not just gaming reviews, but any form of media review that exists at the moment.
Dear Mr. Cameron,
Please allow me to congratulate you on your recent declaration of intent to destroy the menace to our modern society that is private encrypted communications. For too long, in my opinion, has our nation been blighted by privacy, banking, digital security and all the other terrors visited upon us by not allowing the government, and indeed anyone else, to access any and all information we possess and send digitally. A masterstroke, I say, and seeing such a high profile politician as our Dear Leader throw his weight behind the glorious Crusade against privacy and technology. And as if to add to the genius of it all, by making this announcement mere days after a terrible atrocity committed with the aim of stifling an alleged freedom (albeit in an entirely different, devious foreign country) it showed how utterly dedicated you are to the cause! Compared to those other johnny-come-lately alleged right-wing parties currently trying to challenge your dominance, you certainly are a shining example of what the conservative right is truly about! However, for all this outpouring of adoration for this new scheme, allow me to make one or two modest proposals on where to go from here.
Hello Hypothetical Audience, did you have a good Christmas-solstice-whatever and New Years? Brilliant! But now we must face facts, accept that 2015 has now occurred and get on with things once again. So, for the first column of the year I thought I’d share some thoughts I had while watching films over the break. Over the last few weeks I’ve been watching an awful lot of films that have come out of the Marvel film studio, and for the most part they’ve been very good (the only dud I’ve seen so far being Iron Man 2, which was merely a passable filler), and they’ve been attempting to do what the comics have been doing since time immemorial by tying all the characters and events in to a single shared universe. This is a departure from how this has been run previously, mostly due to the fact that all the licences are now being held under a single studio rather than the mess that previously existed, allowing for multi film-, and even franchise-, arcs to exist. This is certainly the first time something like this has been tried with such a large scope, however it may not be as good a thing as it sounds, depending on how it’s handled, and I shall tell you for why after the read-more-thing.
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Hello Hypothetical Audience, did you have a good Christmas-solstice-whatever and New Years? Brilliant! But now we must face facts, accept that 2015 has now occurred and get on with things once again. So, for the first column of the year I thought I’d share some thoughts I had while watching films over the break. Over the last few weeks I’ve been watching an awful lot of films that have come out of the Marvel film studio, and for the most part they’ve been very good (the only dud I’ve seen so far being Iron Man 2, which was merely a passable filler), and they’ve been attempting to do what the comics have been doing since time immemorial by tying all the characters and events in to a single shared universe. This is a departure from how this has been run previously, mostly due to the fact that all the licences are now being held under a single studio rather than the mess that previously existed, allowing for multi film-, and even franchise-, arcs to exist. This is certainly the first time something like this has been tried with such a large scope, however it may not be as good a thing as it sounds, depending on how it’s handled, and I shall tell you for why after the read-more-thing.