Norovirus 2012 reviewed!

Hello and welcome to my review of Norovirus 2012, this years version of the nation's favourite winter stomach flu. Having not been this ill since the winter of 2006, I was hugely excited to see what sickness was on offer, having contracted Norovirus just a month after it went... ah-ha, viral.

I guess that's where that phrase comes from.

FEATURES
This years edition comes with the usual headaches and aching limbs that your average user would experience with regular influenza - this of course includes an over-clocked temperature running at 38C/100F. Vomiting has taken a back step with this edition, making way for a much more aggressive diarrhea phase, but it's the days of piercing stomach cramps that most people who are familiar with the virus will really notice. I'm talking bent over in tears having an alien baby cramps. This years release also shows improved speeds in turning even the smallest thing you eat into watery shit.

LONGEVITY
Four days of  gastric pain and feeling like utter dump, with a day either side feeling pretty rough is an impressive run, especially for this reviewer. Unpredictability offers a key role in Norovirus 2012's development, often offering different users a unique experience. One less day in bed would have felt unworthy, but one more would have been pretty distressing. In the bigger scale of things it is quite contagious, meaning with a little careful attention you can watch how your particular string is passed on and developed by others, creating it's own legacy behind it - a nice little multi-player feature.

COMPATIBILITY
With days spent unable to do anything productive, Norovirus 2012 is particularly compatible with such programs as Netflix, Lovefilm and the much less popular Crackle. It offers those with a guilty consciouns the ability to enjoy a week off, doing nothing but making a dent in the 8 season run of of Despereate Housewives. There are however the usual compatibility issues with white or pastel-coloured underwear.

VALUE FOR MONEY
Norovirus 2012 is free to pick up, but make no mistake, if you work as a salesman on commission, or a ticket tout, the contraction of norovirus is going to amount for some loss of earnings. You're simple not going to be able to get out of bed and rip the world off when you're keeled over and pissing out of your arsehole. But on the plus side, in the four most severe days of the illness I am delighted to say that I saved heaps of money not requiring food and not going out. I had my run with this flu mid-month, but I recommend trying to pick it up the week before payday to really feel the financial viability. Ignoring any incidental direct debits, the only thing I did spent money on was a suspicious looking bag of "Cramp Bark" from a local herb shop I managed to crawl to. Cramp Bark is prepared like a tea, and amazingly did alleviate my stomach pains. As a further financial bonus I now sell it to menopausal woman on the street for ten times it's value.



So there you have it. Norovirus 2012 is a bastard, and for an illness in the 2-7 day market it certainly packs a punch. To get your copy, smear yourself across as many used surfaces as possible and don't be afraid to get in and about other people's poor hygiene.

Happy cramping.

New APPendage

Thirteen months later I feel that I have something worth saying again.

Of course I've been through a couple of phases in the last year; rap-battling, wearing fake beards and most recently wet-shaving my head so I can be like Bane, but this is exciting and not me just acting like an arsehole.

Myself and my very good friend Mr. Terry Cook, are making an iPhone game called Sub Trub. Work in progress...

Terry and myself have a long history of fadding together. We both took up barbershop singing together in the Granite City Chorus, at Uni we had a semi-successful hit of Arnold Schwarzenegger themed online-comics called "Ahnee Camics" and we shared a rather intense summer of sailing down some of Aberdeen's hazardous rivers in a variety of cheap inflatable dinghys that ended so badly the first thing Terry's mum ever said to me was "Oh, are you the one that nearly died?".

We've also had about a hundred thousand ideas we've never done anything about, until now.

It all started with a rather inspirational gentleman called Trey Smith (http://www.treysmithblog.com/) who is a mobile game developer who shares his experiences through his blog and some overly enthusiastic dude-American, but unusually likeable videos. He basically started by coming up with a shit idea on paper, hiring a programmer who knew what they were doing, and getting them to make a decent version of his shit idea.

We thought we could do that, and maybe even come up with a good idea in the first place.

So we designed Sub Trub, it's an underwater scroller where you play a little submarine trying to escape an ominous sea-monster that is pursuing you. Think of a cross between Finding Nemo and the underwater chase in The Phantom Menace when Obi Wan and Liam Neeson are trying to get to the Gungan City. Then re-cross all that with that helicopter game where you have to stop it crashing into stuff.

And that's our game, which should hopefully look something like this:

Terry has done all the graphics for it. We both did graphicy stuff at Uni, and both do graphicy stuff as a living, but I'm shit at coming up with cool looking stuff unless I've copied it from a photo.
(As a side note, check out Terry's watercolour paintings https://www.facebook.com/pages/Terry-Cook-Paintings/421174241278869?ref=ts)

So what I did was make a mahoosive PDF that details every single detail of the game design and spent a week putting ads on various freelancer websites trying to find someone who could make the fucking thing. This is the ad I put up.

We are looking for a talented developer with proven experience working on iPhone games.

The game we are developing is a fun little underwater side-scroller with procedurally generated obstacles that increase in difficulty. Further details of the game will be disclosed upon introducing yourself as a possible candidate.

We will initially be looking for a prototype, then if you are the right person for the job, the full game and future games as well.

The right candidate will have passion for games and be invited to offer input on design and ideas, but for the most part will be provided with the graphics to use. We are also looking for someone who is honest about their abilities, easy to work with and has a compatible personality with the two team members they will be working with, as humour and style will play a major part in this games appeal.

Please respond with examples of previous work, ideally links to app store games you have worked on. In your response please include your favourite Schwarzenegger quote so we know you have read the whole post and have the right priorities in life.

Many thanks

Now, I would like to point out that that last line was probably the most important one, from the 150-ish replies I got from people from all across the world, 70% of them did not give me an Arnie quote and were immediately binned. What is more interesting is that only one person out of the rest actually gave an Arnie FILM quote, the rest gave shit that he'd said in real life, which I guess shows you the difference in how artists and programmers truly think. It would never occurred to me to quote "For me life is continuously being hungry. The meaning of life is not simply to exist, to survive, but to move ahead, to go up, to achieve, to conquer."
 I'd have much more likely said something like  
"It's not a dog, it's a ferret.................. Hello, I'm interesting in the ad for your project. it sounds interesting...."

Anyway, from those that made it past the first round, most of it was generic pasted replies from Indian developers, money obsessed replies from Westerners and "I make rite game for you dearest man" styled chat from the oriental candidates - it was looking bleaker than an ALDI's staff room. Until one chap came along on vWorker.com from Ukraine. He had an excellent rating from 80 previously completed projects, better English than Hugh Grant's great Aunt and an actual noted interested and passion for making games. After much back and forth, he digested my biblical PDF file, asked questions, made suggestions and it was soon clear that he was the man for the job. We had decided to be extremely picky about hiring a programmer, there is no room for wasting money on uselessness, and this guy was a very, very good find, because no-one else got considered.

At the time of writing we are sitting on a pretty cool "proof of concept" demo that he knocked up in a week, that I have running on my unused iPhone 3GS right in front of me. It's exciting, it's actually, probably hopefully, must be going to be a game in the app store, hopefully within the next couple of months. There is still a shit load of stuff to figure out, Apple don't make it simple, they have high standards and a lot of shit to read and a lot of shit to forge understanding, but look out for it towards the end of the year and give it a whirl.

Disclaimer: If you have an suggestions for the development of this game, shove them up your ass-butt. Serious.

Thanks guys!

A review of Bridget Christie: Housewife Surrealist

Christie's 2011 Edinburgh Fringe outing takes place in The Stand 2, a smaller, more confined sequel to The Stand itself. In many ways it is physically higher up, due to the accession of stairs occurring before entering the venue, rather than after.

Due to the crowded nature of the lobby area, I actually had to pass a friend a ten pound note to purchase drinks, as he had accidentally attained a more succinct and strategic vantage point on the bar - and it was my round. The refusal to accept Scottish notes was a predictable let down, but from a shrouded glance at the coins I received in change, I can say that the drinks were priced averagely for the time and place. The cider tasted of apples, which more than can be said for the Pear Kopparberg.

The queue was scattered, like someone had dropped a game of scrabble into a funnel, then scattered something else over the floor, however reasonable priority awareness was exercised when we finally entered the performance room. The show operated a strict "no latecomers" policy, which agreed with me both as an amateur comedian, and a premature ejaculator. Although the prospect of being anywhere The Stand, and any alluded mention of Stewart Lee, had already inflated my penis to a monitorable level.

Entering the performance room was much like entering a circular room with tiered single chairs that faced a stage area. The end of the second last row offered the chance to comfortably sit with my backpack by my side on the floor, propped up against an unused fireplace that offered no comedic input to the atmosphere whatsoever. The seating layout straddled the line of intimacy and claustrophobia well, leaving the broader gentleman to exchange horizontal shoulder altitudes with each other, for the entire hour.

The product of sitting still for an hour and drinking cider offered the opportunity to visit the toilets upon departure. They operated the minimal divisible station of a 2:1:1 ratio between urinals, sinks and toilet. Maintained, but unloved.

Christie's performance itself was good, and I quite fancied her by the end.

 YeeeeUP

7/10

Napster Margherita

Back in the day when you wanted a pizza you went to the shop and bought one.

Then takeaways become very popular and you could just phone up and get a pizza delivered straight to your door.

But since the internet became so popular, millions of people are now going online, choosing from a enormous range of pizzas and downloading them for free, and it's killing the industry.

Now technological advances are good and all, but ever since 16-inch broadband came along it has become a lot easier for people to download pizzas through their giant anaconda style internet cables. The only justice being that pizzas come in square boxes, so if you do the maths, the largest pizza you can fit down a 16-inch cable is about 11.3inches. Thankyou Pythagoras, you've just saved Dominoes 30% in their battle with pirate pizza downloads

But this doesn't stop millions of websites streaming illegal all you can eat buffets all over the world. Everyone from the big pizza chains like Pizza Hut and Dominoes, to the smaller fast food outlets are suffering, because they have to rely on a small group of honest diehard customers, like the family from Home Alone and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, to buy their pizzas.

It's also having a devastating effect on the scooter industry.

Now I don't download pizzas, I pay for mine, I get all the extra toppings and garlic bread and I tip the delivery guy at least 15% and this is because I like to enjoy a good honest meal when I sit down to listen to a new album two weeks before it's release date.

Life Lesson

I don't update this blog very often because if you don't have anything interesting to say, you should shut your stupid face.

My gift to you.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane ...woah shit yeah, it's a plane.

When I can't sleep, I like to watch videos of plane crashes.

I usually like to watch about an hours worth of plane crash videos before attempting to sleep as well.

I don't know what it is about plane crashes, but they are beyond fascination. I think it's because, in my opinion, plane crashes are top of the list when it comes to disasters. Millions of pounds go into the designing, testing, manufacturing and operating of airplanes, then you fill them with people who have paid a fairly large amount of money to be on them, then you take that whole package into the sky and then it crashes and kills everyone and destroys everything. I mean, that is what I call a lose, lose, situation. In hindsight - probably shouldn't have bothered. It's like buying 42 inch widescreen TV and a Nintendo Wii, only to smash the controller through the screen on your first game of Tennis.

It's like that.

Plane crashes can be avoided, they are man-made disasters, and that's why they are so much worse than natural disasters. Tsunami's for instance, roll into town, uproot houses, sweep entire towns away and clock up huge death tolls, what can you do about it though? - just stand and applaud as you get run over by a library. They don't have nearly the level of menace that a plane crash has. Look at Japan, we saw a week of just out-of-control devastation, pure rulebook physics just fucking stuff up and that was the end of the enquiry - nobody's fault, it will probably happen again, let's get cleaning. They won't have made a dent repairing the damage caused, but the interesting part is over, and nobody watching TV cares any more. The only interesting part was the precarious nuclear situation, which was, yes, man-made - and the only real way to make sure that goes down in history as a memorable disaster is if a plane crashes in to it.

Wow, imagine.

It's not up for debate that human beings love watching plane crashes. 9/11 being the mother of all plane crashes goes to show that. People want to see all angles of the crashes, they want to know where it hit, how fast it was going, how low it was flying, what flight number it was, what the onboard vegetarian option was. Everything. And not only did 9/11 capture the fascination of the entire world, it made plane crashes cool! A few years later "Lost" came out - a whole fucking TV series about a plane crash that was the most popular show for the six years it was on. Then the minute that finished another american TV show called "The Event" started up, and just to wet the appetite of the frothing public, it featured an out-of-control jumbo jet heading straight for a populated area in it's pilot (no pun intended) episode! So don't frown at me watching plane crash videos online all the time, at least I'm not making up new situations where plane crashes could happen. I'm reflecting on the how we as human beings react to real, visual disaster, I'm not re-writing Titanic so that the ship hits an iceberg - then get's hit by a plane.

But I'm telling you, the crucial part to a totally shocking plane crash is the human involvement. Look at this image from then 2009 monster/disaster film "Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus".

The text isn't in the actual film, but what you can clearly see happening there is that a giant shark has jumped out of the ocean and taken down a plane. The effect has been lost. This is the Chris Tucker of plane crashes, even if it happened in real life you'd just be like "well that was totally O.T.T., but it happened... now what?"

Meanwhile this artists impression of a collision between a taxi-ing Pan am 747 and a KLM Boeing 747 that was attempting take-off in Tenerife in 1977, that killed 583 people...

...christ

...

...

to Youtube!

Eezee Trapeze

I only usually update this blog when I have something interesting to say, and since the main point of its inception was to charter my various fads and passing interests, I thought it was worth telling everyone that I just got bored and signed up for a 5 week course called Eezee Trapezee. I feel it's only fair, especially as I didn't mention the block of Argentine Tango lessons I did in March.

Moving on...

Eezee Trapezee runs at Firhill Sports Complex (Glasgow, yes) and involves learning some circus shit or something - I've know idea, we'll find out when I get there. It was a toss up between booking that or just Yoga, until the superhero potential of learning to do cool aerial rope stuff was pointed out to me. The key line for me was "no strength or flexibility required" as I can barely touch my knees. The only flexibility I have is being able spend my afternoon finding a ridiculous course to go and book.

But, in a week where one of my friends went out and bought a parrot to satisfy an unquenchable thirst for exotic animals and another woke up on Sunday and decided to just go buy a Nissan Figaro, I feel I have dropped behind somewhat on the spontaneity spectrum. In order to fully catch up, I'd probably still need to just walk out of my house and get on a flight to... Jakarta... but the thing about too much spontaneity is that you'd never have anything to look forward to.

Much of this has come from the fact that: the Glasgow Comedy festival is over and I have vowed to take at least two weeks off gigging/watching comedy and going out and drinking too much, and that other than modelling a fairly sweet Sonomatic Pipe Scanner, I've been somewhat dead at work for April - so I need interesting stuff to fill my time.

useful for the home

I went through a phase two weeks ago of going to Mitchell Library every afternoon and pretending to do important research along with all the other scholars and students that populate the desks there. One day I read the entire script to the second series of "I'm Alan Partridge", the next I read a magazine about writing - which is a bit like drinking a glass of water in the shower.

Then last week I had a dream that I should write a book called "Ciara from Skytown". No idea where that one came from, but I loved the sound of it and pictured the main character as being like Little My from The Moomins, but much more introverted and intelligent.

I started writing down some ideas and stuff, then I even had a go at just diving in and starting it, but I have completely lost interest now. If anyone has any cool ideas for such a title - fax me. The story so far goes that she gets on a train.

The point that I've just started making in the last two paragraphs is that I can not do anything interesting or productive without there being consequences for not doing it. I have always known this, but occasionally stray from the path to try and prove myself wrong, but it never works out in the long run.

If I'm to model a Sonomatic Pipe Scanner, I need someone to tell me give me a deadline, and not pay me if I miss it.
If I'm doing stand-up comedy, I need gigs booked. I need a specific time to be prepared for, so that I don't look like a dick.
If I'm writing a book based on a title I dreamt, I either need a publishing deal or a gun pointed to my head bollocks.
Ergo, if want to be a trapeze artist, I need to take a bloody course, run by someone else, with dates, and times, and prices, that will bloody teach me how to do it or I'm £40 worse off and have nothing to talk about!

And that would all make so much sense if I did want to become a trapeze artist. But I honestly just want to go so there might be some weird people I can laugh it.