DinnyHoon

AND ALSO CHRISTMAS FILMS ARE UTTER SHIT

That is all.

That fucking time of year.

OR: A rant about the tedium of Advent

I never liked Christmas. No, actually, that’s a lie. I love Christmas, but only as a week-long thing. December 1st-22nd might as well be any other time of the year. Christmas day is still one of my favourite days on the calendar (despite my lack of religion), but I really do hate the commercial aspect of this the most overcelebrated holiday in the western world.

Yes, there are nice things about the commercialisation of Christmas. The Coke adverts, for example, reduce me to the mindset of an incontinent 6-year-old every single time. You know it’s that time of year when you’re channel-hopping, hand in pants, and you just stop because you heard a voice from your childhood whisper “holidays are comin’, holidays are comin’..”. On a slightly related note, I fucking love mince pies.

But OH MY FUCKING GOD THE CHRISTMAS SONGS. Such loathesome tunes, in EVERY. SINGLE. COMMERCIAL. ESTABLISHMENT. Even an innocent watch of an episode of Corrie struggles to go by without Noddy Holder’s impertinent voice asking me if I’m nailing my fucking socks to the wall at that very moment. No, Noddy, I’m not. I’m in the Rovers with Kevin Webster and as previously mentioned, I’ve a mince pie and some serious scrote-itch. Oh, and a quick note to ASDA/Tesco/Victorias Secret/McBurney Refridgeration Ltd: It does not count as Christmas advertising to dedicate the last 1.6 seconds of your regular advert to some berk who utters the phrase “THE PERFECT GIFT THIS CHRISTMUSSS”.

Right, let’s get a concise list going:

THINGS THAT ARE BRILLIANT ABOUT CHRISTMAS:
Turkey dinner, huge meal/drink with extended family, mince pies, Advent calendars, watching everyone on a Christmas night out the week before, trudging through ice and snow to get to your warm local on Christmas week, forgetting all other personal/financial problems to hang around with your friends and family. For a day, at least.

THINGS THAT ARE ROYALLY SHIT ABOUT CHRISTMAS:
Pretty much everything commercial, having the bloody thing shoved down your throat as early as mid-November, decorations, Noddy Holder, the inevitable explosion on EastEnders, The X Factor, the DFS sale, ribbons all over the fucking adverts, e-tailers changing the skin on their websites, that odd period between Christmas and New Year where business inexplicably continues for 2 whole days, Christmas carols, Christmas shopping, the awkwardness of receiving gifts, the unreliability of Royal Mail, the inevitable BBC News article detailing how online shopping has increased this year, some fucker telling me it’s also Chanukah, Christmas pudding, people asking me why I don’t like Christmas pudding, people refusing to buy Stollen even though it’s delicious, people who feel Christmassy on the 16th of November, the inevitabile “what the fuck is the point” feeling that starts around January the 6th and lasts a month or two, and Noddy Holder again.

BY FAR THE BEST THING ABOUT CHRISTMAS EVER TIMES A MILLION:
The Pogues ft. Kirsty MacColl - Fairytale of New York

In hindsight, that wasn’t very concise at all. Oh well, must dash, I think I see Noddy Holder outside.

Can’t think of anything witty to put here

Bloody hell, I was right about the lack of sleep I’d get. Between GT5, the cricket, and being a social outgoing prick, I’ve managed less sleep than I actually thought humanly possible. My brain’s probably been damaged beyond repair to some degree, but I haven’t noticed too much going wrogfnhkj,g,ghdIMTRAPPEDINAFACTORYgnfkgfd.

One thing that pissed me off about GT is that there’s no Spa. Really Polyphony, really? You port 800 cars from GT4 (which is basically cheating), and you don’t even use the time saved to take a few snaps in Belgium? Well at least Monza is there I suppose. And Trial Mountain. Still, it’s one of the most accessible starts I’ve ever seen on a Gran Turismo title. Yes, your first toe in the pool of the game consists of throwing a piece of shit around the Autumn Ring Mini for the Sunday Cup, but after that there’s a world of opportunities. The new levelling system is much better than the forever-daunting licence requirements of old. You don’t have to be a completionist to get far in the game, but that rewarding option remains. They’ve really got it spot on this time.

Oh, and to any Australians who may or may not stumble upon this page: Ner ner ne-ner ner.

No sleep ‘til Brooklyn

I don’t plan on sleeping this week. I was going to get my head down early last night, but instead we watched The Lion King. You’ll laugh you’ll cry etc etc.

The reason I have such an (optimistic) urge to stay above the line of consciousness this week is simple. Gran Turismo 5.

UNOFFICIAL LIST OF THINGS THAT MAY OR MAY NOT KILL ME ABOUT GT5:

• Nordschleife at night.
• Ferraris.
• Go-karts.
• Spa Francorchamps in the rain.
• The F2010.
• That crazy Red Bull supermobile that does the ‘Ring F1 circuit in 1:04.
• Nordschleife at night a few more times.
• Online endurance races with damage and tyre wear.
• Nordschleife at night, in the rain, in the crazy Red Bull car, 20 laps, online, with damage and tyre wear.
• The 6-minute intro that I plan to watch EVERY SINGLE TIME.

I just can’t wait to be king for online endurance races. I haven’t played Forza 3 as much as I played Forza 2, but the Matchbox360 endurance leagues in the latter were just mesmeric. It’s just you and a group of others, and you’re with them for an hour. Adter a while you just get into a trance, and you seem to stop blinking. You stop taking it corner-by-corner, and you check your sector times. Then your lap times. Then your last 5 lap times. That’s how you judge your form in an endurance race. The scale just gets larger and larger, while you forget that the rest of the planet exists. Doing all that in a Ferrari Dino might just ruin my last pair of undies. And that is why I will not sleep this week.

Also it’s The Ashes.

The panic will fall down around you, if you don’t do what I say

Yes yes, it’s cliche to post subjectively meaningful lyrics on a tumblelog, but I don’t use this as a tumblelog, so fuck you.

Temptation Greets You (Arctic Monkeys) is a song that’s been jammed in my head recently. I can sort-of relate to the awkwardness and the want-of-will in the Arctics B-side. The song describes a close friendship between a dude and a woman, and how one of them kinda wants something to happen, but at least one of them (the narrator in this case) has decided that it would be a bad route to take. It compares the situation to that friend everyone had in school that was always persuading them to cause a little too much mischief.

“Temptation greets you like your naughty mate. The one that made you steal and set things on fire, the one you haven’t seen of late.”

Also, there’s a Dizzee Rascal bit in there for some reason. Very underexposed and underrated song, and probably the best of the Sheffield band’s B-sides.

The Antlers - Hospice

I don’t think I’ve ever heard such a beautiful album. This little-known Coldplay-without-the-selfabsorbed-arseyness outfit threw this album directly at the face of the music industry last year, and it seems that no-one outside of Pitchfork noticed. Hospice is a concept album based on an abusive relationship between a hospice worker in an emotionally abusive relationship with his girlfriend, who is dying of bone cancer. There are a few references to The Bell Jar in there as well. Quite how autobiographical the record is has always been kept quiet by frontman Peter Silbermann, but fictional or not, it is an absolutely heartwrenching work that will move you in ways no album ever has. The narrative takes a few unexpected turns, particularly in the song ‘Bear’, a sort-of flashback song about an abortion the pair went through once. Except the baby’s a teddy bear. Or something. Anyway, make a cup of tea, grab the easily-available liner notes from the internet, and read along to the most heart-wrenching tale ever put to music. All the way to the (inevitable) man-plus-guitar acoustic epilogue.

Things that take up my time in 2010

Er, just in case any future posts catch you completely by surprise and you have a heart attack or something, I might as well give some clue as to what you can expect.

LISTENING:
Radiohead
The Antlers
Tallest Man on Earth
Neutral Milk Hotel
White Stripes
Pink Floyd
King Crimson
…Et cetera.

PLAYING:
Minecraft (this takes up most of my time now)
F1 2010
Halo: Reach

WATCHING:
House
Family Guy
Black Books (again)
South Park
How I Met Your Mother
The Apprentice

SOCIAL:
Last.fm
Twitter
Facebook
(I’ve got others, but I never touch ‘em.)

That’s all that out the way anyway. Hilarious alt-text as usual by the way. Have you ever noticed how much your mind races when you’re behind a keyboard at 3am and you know you should have been in bed 3 hours ago? There is some profound shit going through my head right now. Evening naps and midnight cups of tea are never a good thing. Neither is having a laptop sat right next to your bed. Especially if that laptop has a backlit keyboard. Anyway, I’ll stop now.

PS: I think I need a new Tumblr skin.

Bit of an Icebreaker…

NB 20/10/10: This entry was written at 3am, all typos are a direct result of sleep deprivation and have been deliberately left in.

Don’t know where I got my idea to blog again (probably the opening scenes of The Social Network), but reading this all the way back to 2008 reminds me of why I should record my thoughts, musings and observations, even if no-one reads them but me. It’s something to look back on months and years from now, y’know? It’s never been easier to document your thoughts and have them readily available wherever you are, even years after you’ve written them. So I might as well take advantage of that.

My previous posts were almost exclusively about video games (except for one or two where I talk about how much I blog about video games). Whilst gaming is one of my main hobbies and a large part of my life, I feel as thought I should remember my angsty 20-year-old self for the other things I enjoy, like graphics cards, foul language and Radiohead.

One annoying thing I’ve noticed is that dinnyhoon.com no longer works as a URL. I’ve just looked this up and Eclipse (who were giving out free .com’s a couple of years ago) have actually invoiced me £8.49*5 for 5 domains I registered a couple of years ago, one of them being dinnyhoon.com. Well they can sit on that domain until registration expires on the 2th of December, and if it doesn’t get parked, I’ll have it back before Christmas. Until then, dinnyhoon.tubmlr.com will just have to do. Or I could get a .tk domain.

FUCK IT

Let’s tumble.