After all the heaviness of the last couple of days it’s time for some light relief in the form of some of my favourite album covers, recreated from memory in MS paint (the free one that comes with windows). If you know my record collection you probably know what they all are though some of them may be distorted by my memory. I also made a flickr group so other people can guess and add their own memory pictures of album covers in MS paint, it’s here.

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Got on the bus at 8:40 got to Westbourne park tube about 8:55 Hammersmith and City line closed for unspecified reasons. by the time I’d walked to Shepherds Bush (about 10) the whole system was down and there was pretty much chaos on the green. Got into work, given the nature of my employer, found out what had happened pretty quickly.

What a wierd day at work, similar in mood to the days of the New York and Madrid attacks even though it’s a lot closer to home can’t really apprehend what my reaction is, in the terrorist calculus these attacks seem much worse than the IRA attacks in Manchester and Wilmslow in the early 90’s even though in both those cases I was close enough to hear the blast. Writing about chart data XML whilst all around me people hear testimony from frightened witnesses and un-edited satelite feeds pour in showing deserted streets and police cordons, is difficult.

Sitting around the other day, drinking beer and playing a video game, lying back and generally being privileged and decadent it occurred to me that we’re not really going anywhere; the idea that there’s no generation gap = stagnant culture (i can’t be the only one who’s felt vaguely depressed about all the Live8 stuff) and also that a lot of clever people are spending a lot of time helping people to share holiday photos rather than sorting out important stuff. Those fat advanced societies of certain 60s science fiction (they generally get trashed by the heroic, vigorous crypto-fascistic free-market humans) seem closer to where we’re at most of the time than the Cory Doctorow/Charlie Stross style Singularity stuff that’s all the rage at the moment. If you’re not in the know, (and why should you be? You probably read proper books or maybe Dan Brown and Harry Potter, either way I expect you avoid the shiny cover section in Waterstones) these guys are saying technology is advancing so quickly, and that this rate of change itself is accelerating so rapidly, that in twenty years we’ll be so crazily advanced that well who knows what, the Internet will gain sentience and we’ll all download our brains into the latest model of iPod or something, basically they’re saying “hey, we don’t know” (you’re sci-fi writers, if your not going to even attempt to extrapolate what are we paying you for?).

Anyway yesterday I found 2 web pages which are saying similar things, to what i was thinking, helping me feel a warm glow of connection to my fellow man and suggesting that the beer/video games combination is a probably a popular one.
The first one

We flatter ourselves that we live in interesting times but isn’t this just one more example of that particular blindness our solipsistic age has about itself, a more severe form of the disease whereby Princess Diana can be rated the most important (or was it second-most important) Briton ever?

and the, perhaps more interesting, second one

Jonathan Huebner, a physicist working at the Pentagon’s Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake, California … says the rate of technological innovation reached a peak a century ago and has been declining ever since. And like the lookout on the Titanic who spotted the fateful iceberg, Huebner sees the end of innovation looming dead ahead.

OK so some of his data is kind of arbitrarily chosen (how do you judge the importance on an invention? I’m sure the printing press didn’t really send immediate shockwaves around the world, maybe Furby’s are actually really important) but it’s certainly a refreshing change from cloying techno-utopianism which is the standard for large swathes of the web. Particularly regarding Moores Law which has hidden the fact that people haven’t actually been getting much better at the programming side of things for a generation, you see that exponential curve and think it solves everything, but really it can sort of hide reality; we’ve found one thing that we can incrementally improve very quickly for a limited period of time and we think that all technology and development works like that, an idea for which there’s really not much evidence.

Which would win in a fight to the death between a salt water crocodile and a Great White shark staged in an enclosed arena (e.g. swimming pool)?

See, Tom? I told you I would post a load of crap on here. I’m only amazed it took me this long… [yes but you still have to get me to publish it (if you haven’t worked it out, dan wrote this) - Tom]

Caught bits of this on BBC/Sky multi-channel-thingy after getting home from the pub, most of it was predictably rubbish and sounded even rubbisher, what with all the wind and keeping the volume down so as not to wake my Dad: Razorlight (quick switch to one of the 6000 live poker chanels he’s about to speak), Coldplay (yuk), Madonna (preseved in formaldahyde?) , Bon Jovi (wardrobe by topshop), Pete Doherty (arg!), Coldplay again? (possibly, all these white guys sound the same to me) then we cut to the New York coverage and saw Kanye West blow the whole Hyde Park gang off stage from across a huge ocean several hours after everyone allready went home (made it look like the weren’t trying). He was followed by a predictably polished Will Smith (heralded the next day in our car by the top 40 android as the highlight of the weekend) and then (WTF?) Def Lepard; those sunglasses really didn’t work with that new fat face Joe.

While we’re mentioning the top 40, I’m genuinely upset that they don’t play all the records in full anymore, only the top 20, now they have some aweful retro compilation before the action begins (totally anti what the charts should be about IMO), then we skip as fast as possible over all the interesting records so we can get to the stuff that we hear 60 times a day on Radio One anyway. And the presenters are FUCKING COCKS even by the standards of that ‘Wes’ guy who used to present it.

So to summarise: Sorry guys it’s an emergency here we can’t have people bringing too much politics or interesting music onto our screens, people might get over excited and then god knows what might happen, basically Bono and Richard Curtis will sort it out, and you know, at the end of the day thank God we (well Robbie Williams in any case) made poverty history, now we can get on with our lives, shame that Tom A’s probably going to have to get a new job but I’m sure we can all agree that its a small price to pay for bringing an end to this kind of shocking global inequity.

[update: It’s the following Monday, I’m less bored of the world and it’s only far to point out that this is an incredibly dull post (incase the title didn’t give that away), if you’re reading this you should probably stop now]
It’s Friday, I have appraisals and a report into storing chart data to write and I have to leave early to get to Manchester. So in the absence of anything interesting to write, it’s time for a round up of all the games I’ve played over the last 6 months.

I’ve been dipping into Disgaea which, with it’s random levels and massive scope for organizational anality this is a suprisingly good pick-up and play game once you’ve done the main story mode. 15 mins before you need to pick up the dry cleaning? Why not get one of your characters promoted and rationalise out your inventory! For a while I wanted to write something long about this game, there’s so much to say about how all the wonderfully intricate mechanics work with one another in a beatifully transparent way, but whenever I start it all seems to get out of hand, and where do you start, basically if you own a PS2 you should buy it, play it for 50 hours, and then email me and we can talk about it in mind-numbing detail.

As i’ve mentioned before I loved Outrun 2, I eventually got stuck on the mini missions (heart courier on about level 6 or 7 was the final straw) so playing slowed down, but just thinking about it makes me want to swoop down the valley on the cloudy stage seeing the glimmer on that distant lake. People who don’t love this game should probably seek counceling.

On Sunday evenings Emma and I have been battling through Zelda: Four Swords Adventure on the Gamecube, we typically do a couple of levels and have a horse race or something, the game really suits a leisurly approach, it’s never particularly hard, but the requirement for co-operation slows the game’s pace down considerably and generally promotes a very relaxed gaming experience, nicely punctuated by the huge hoards of cannon fodder that the game occasionally chucks at your party.

more excitement later…