Oh hai Christmas Eve!! This means that another year is almost done SOOO I thought I'd have a quick run through of the very best 'things' I've come across in 2011 ^_^
iPad 2
Yes, I was sceptical at first but the upgrade to last years Must-Have gadget is a DAMN good upgrade. First off it's wicked fast. I found with my iPad 1 that page turns in magazines and just loading up the settings app was a bit sluggish especially when running iOS 5. The iPad 2 has totally got rid of this general sluggishness and when typing quickly it actually can keep up with me! The device itself is beautiful, the rounded corners and ultra thinness make it a real joy to hold and use for long period of time, and the weight of it really lets you use it for hours without your arms getting sore. The battery life as well is nothing less than epic! The only issue I have with it is the speaker, which is still mono and annoyingly faces away from the user. This is an issue when using it to watch TV or video content on the device but obviously sliding in a pair of earphone can solve that problem.
iPhone 4S
Much of what I said about the iPad vs iPad 2 is true here. The responsiveness of iOS 5 on the iPhone 4S is much improved and is especially noticeable when launching and using the camera app. The main thing I LOVE about my iPhone 4S, besides it's hefty 64GB capacity, is the camera. It's actually amazing what kind of images you can get out of this phone, it's easy to forget that it is just a phone. It totally replaces most people's needs for a compact camera and has resulted in me not bothering to bring my DSLR out with me anywhere unless I am going to specifically take photos. Siri voice dictation and natural language voice recognition is damn good fun and is incredibly useful. I can imagine it being indispensable if you spend a good deal of time driving. Apple have released the best phone available, again. And although externally it is near identical to the iPhone 4, the internals allow you to take joy in using it like no other phone has ever allowed you to do.
(I should say at this point that iCloud is also a HUGE thing this year but it warrants its own blog entry as it's too big a thing to go over in a paragraph)
Lady GaGa - Born This Way
The most hyped album release ever?!?! Likely. On launch day Gaga took over the New York subway with adverts and on the London Underground on every newspaper cover was the album cover. BUT the album delivered a lot of substance. A real eclectic mix of genre types infused with Gaga's fun and intelligence to the point of making almost every track deep and suitable for repeat listens to tease out any meaning therein. The title track Born This Way is an anthemic rallying cry for all the people 'normal' society consider freaks, but it marries it with a real disco stomping bass and a wickedly good video. Other album stand outs include Judas, Marry The Night, Government Hooker, You and I and The Edge of Glory. The album feels almost like a greatest hits album if it weren't for the one theme running through the whole album, accepting who you are and loving it! To quote RuPaul "If you can't love yourself, how the hell you gunna love somebody else gurl!"
I'm a podcast whore, and one of the major failing of the iTunes app on the iPhone is for allowing you to automatically download new podcasts that you are subscribed to. Instacast does this for you flawlessly! It syncs all of your subscriptions and listened history with iCloud so you can be kept in sync between your iPhone and iPad. It's an app that doesn't warrant much conversation, but if you have an iPhone or iPad and listen to podcasts regularly, you owe it to yourself to get this app!!
One of the major themes running through 2011 for me has been the dominance and controversies surrounding social networks and your information. Google have launched their 'social network' Google+ this summer, but it's not really a social network. It's a sharing platform for everything you do online, and for some things you do offline. I am in love with the resposiveness of the development surrounding G+ every week or two there's a swathe of new features which make it more easy and fun to use, but also allow you a degree of control about who sees what that Facebook doesn't seem to want to make obvious or easy to do. Hangouts (10 person video chat) alone is a damn good reason to make an account and use it but the fact of the matter is if you use ANY of google's services, from search to GMail to YouTube, your experience will be enhanced by using Google+ and by having people you care about in your circles.
Game of Thrones
So I was late on getting into this one, about 10 years late, but George R. R. Martin's epic A Song of Ice and Fire series is the best thing to hit fantasy literature since Tolkien published The Lord of The Rings. A Game of Thrones, the first book in the series, has been made into an HBO show which is religiously faithful to the book and has an amazing cast and very high production values making it very very very watchable and the cast is fantastic!! It's my choice for the best TV series of 2011 only to be rivalled by Downton Abbey.
WOW! Where to begin! . . . hmmm, how about at the beginning.
The first game I ever remember being truly hooked into as a child was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past on the Super Nintendo (SNES). It was a mammoth game filled with some of the most amazing pieces of story, adventure, mind-bending puzzles and discovery. It was a huge game, spanning environments ranging from forest, to desert, to mountains, and once you had finished adventuring in the world as it seemed, there lurked underneath an alternate Dark World for you to explore which would test your skills to the max! Since then I've greeted every Zelda release with unbridled anticipation and have never been disappointed. This game series, more than any other in history, is the high watermark. It is the game series all others are compared to, and it is adored by millions of fans around the world. The original game in the series was the first one to include a battery save, allowing you to quest without the need for silly passwords to get you back to where you were after a break. This was 25 years ago now!
To celebrate Nintendo has already released the most celebrated game in the series, Ocarina of Time on 3DS, alongside giving away Four Swords Adventures to all 3DS and DSi owners. There is also a brand new game out in the series, Skyward Sword, which features one to one movement control allowing you to feel like Link more than ever, and also has a full orchestral soundtrack for the first time in a Zelda game. Music has always played an integral part of the Zelda series, from stand out catchy tunes, to music making actually being incorporated into the gameplay in the form of an ocarina, a flute, a conductors baton, and now a harp. This made it obvious to Nintendo that the best way of celebrating this more acclaimed of franchises was to throw a series of high quality concerts around the world, bringing fans together to celebrate moments from the past 25 years. Unfortunately for us there were only three concerts initially announced. One in Tokyo, one in L.A., and finally one in Europe. Not just anywhere in Europe mind, but London! I HAD to go and luckily my future housemate managed to get a couple of tickets before they sold out (which they did in a matter of minutes).
We arrived at the HMV Hammersmith Apollo an hour and a half early for the concert and there was already a MASSIVE queue of people snaking around barricades outside the venue. The venue itself was dressed with Zelda posters and a projector played film of Skyward Sword as we waited. There were so many 3DS owners there that it was a brilliant time to make friends in the queue, StreetPass with people and even play some Zelda! When the doors finally opened there was a palpable air of excitement and anticipation. Once inside the lobby I queued up instantly to pick up some merchandise, a Zelda 25th anniversary t-shirt, and a poster featuring each of the major incarnations of link throughout the years. It's so beautiful!!!
In the auditorium, as the orchestra finished tuning and the lights dimmed none other than Eiji Aonuma, producer of the Zelda series, took the stage to introduce the nights proceedings! The crowd went berserk!!
Japanese developers, especially one as popular and well known as Aonuma rarely step outside of Japan, so this was a treat! The orchestra struck up playing a series of absolutely phenomenal arrangements of songs from the series' many games and did an excellent job, if you buy Skyward Sword when it's released you'll also get a recording of the music played tonight.
Eiji Aonuma
After a few pieces were performed, one Miss Zelda Williams came on stage and would act as the host for the evening. Her father, the actor Robin Williams, famously named her after the Zelda series of games and even featured in some adverts earlier this year promoting the re-release of Ocarina of Time. She was such a sweetheart on stage and was clearly one of 'us', a geek who escaped real life and LOVED living through Link's adventures to save the Princess Zelda from whatever evil had beset her. She even got a bit emotional at a few points when talking about her own experiences and personal history with the series.
Stand out pieces were the 25th Anniversary Medley, a beautiful arrangement of Great Fairy's Fountain Theme featuring harps, and Princess Zelda'ss theme, which actually made me cry a little! It just hit me with a mix of nostalgia and reminded me of my love for the series.
After the orchestra played their listed set of songs, the audience gave them an epic standing ovation and wouldn't stop clapping, wouldn't stop that is until the conductor, Eimear Noone, spoke and introduced Koji Kondo, the composer of the main Zelda themes in addition to the Mario themes you know for sure. The crowd went even more mental as Kondo looked a tad bit embarrassed, sat at a Yamaha grand piano, triggering the crowd to fall instantly silent, and played Link's Grandma's Theme from the Wind Waker. It was beautiful and I started crying for a second time.
After Kondo received his rapturous applause, Aonuma was back on stage and spoke of his history with the series, how amazing this series of concerts had been, and how the fans really help the developers keep on making better and better games. It was a very sweet little monologue and allowed him to put in a little plug for the new Zelda game, out in a couple of weeks. He then handed over to the conductor for the final time, who then played the sweeping main score for Skyward Sword.
Koji Kondo
The night was a massive success and I felt very lucky to have managed to have gone to it. Looking at the tweets after the concert it seemed that everyone either cried, or had wave after wave of goosebumps as the concert progressed! It showed how affecting video games can be, and how we can have emotional ties to the time we spent playing our favourite games. I hope you all enjoy the new game, and enjoy listening to the recorded versions of the music performed tonight ^_^
(Here's a piano version of Grandma's Theme, try not to cry :') )
Saturday 3 September 2011
In the past two weeks I've had three friends stop speaking to me and decide they want me out of their life for reasons ranging from a misunderstanding to plain childishness. Two other friends have ignored me when I was trying to talk to them and needed someone to listen to me and give me a slap/advice. This REALLY pissed me off. I mean, why call yourself a friend when you're only interested in who you may or may not hook up with on recon or grindr, and ignore the person who is sat across the fucking table from you having lunch, trying to do something they find very hard to do?!?! I've always been a closed person, I deal with my own shit and bottle up emotions like it's going out of style. But when someone pleads you to open up to them, and you start doing that, you kind of expect them then to not totally ignore you and make you feel like shit by preferring to talk to random fucks then give you their attention. What's the solution to this problem? One solution would be to cut this person out of your life totally. A bad move in my opinion, the world is tiny and the gay world even more so. It's far better to keep the person as an acquaintance, one you don't make a special effort to see or divulge sensitive information to.
These social fuck-ups have been combined with an increased workload and demands made by my supervisor and things generally messing up in the lab. Happily, after investing a lot of time and energy I'm starting to sort out these hiccoughs. Result being that I'm a bit more loopy then usual, a bit more bi-polar-esque, and in need of as many hugs as the people I still call friends can spare.
However, not all is doom and gloom. I'm moving soon, form Clapham Common to by Ealing Common. Longer commute which will mean more time to myself where I can actually force myself to read a journal article, or just have chill out time to myself. I'm moving in with two very lovely, very intelligent friends which will be a big change from my current situation. No pets = win as well. Smaller room, but bigger, nicer living room/kitchen combo. And it's going to work out a slight bit cheaper than my current set up. Downside is that I have to move all my crap 10 miles or so. I'm sure I'll work out something :P
Also on the upside: I have new earphones!!! I accidentally washed/tumble-dried my old V-moda's I bought when I came to London in September and have been making do with the FUCKING SHITE Apple iPhone earphones for the past 6 weeks. Can I just say that it is impossible to not go insane if you have to use the tube daily and only have leaky, cheap earphones to protect you from the screeching, rumbling, and general natter of the London Underground. I sent for the Klipsch S5i's, only £80 on Amazon at the moment. They're basically the same as the S4i's only they have a more rubberised exterior and the remote is waterproof. They've recently won a recommendation from the Engadget Back to College series as the best entry level (sub £150) earphones. For me they're pretty bloody good. Sound quality is what you'd expect for the price and the noise isolation is good too. The only issue I have is that the clip that comes with them is crap at actually staying attached to your clothing.
Thanks to the earphones and the prospect of moving in with some lovely smart kinky guys, I've been able to hold onto some semblance of sanity, rather than breaking down in tears at random points and feeling lost in general. It's very, very easy to feel isolated and like you're being pulled along by the current in London. Dealing with this is the challenge I face over the coming months. But it should work itself out. Things do that mostly because you can't stop time :P
