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Merry Christmas everybody!
blog Thursday 25th of December, 2008
Okay, so it's actually Boxing Day by this point — but Merry Christmas anyway. Had a brilliant day with family, a lot of very thoughtful gifts, and some great food. I hope everyone else had as good a day!
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Rainbow over Stony
blog Tuesday 7th of October, 2008
Impressive weather on the way home — in the two mile drive back we had storms and sunshine. It all culminated in this rather excellent rainbow, which made me realise two things:
- I'm going to miss Stony quite a lot once we move away at the start of November. It's a great little town, and I wish I'd spent a bit more time living here. That said, I'm looking forward to my new adventures in Geordieland.
- Maybe the iPhone does need a better camera...
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I'm not dead, baby
blog Tuesday 30th of September, 2008
Been totally shit for not posting anything since I got back. This will be remedied soon (probably). Writing various things — about emotion in video games (real and imagined) and about meat (which I've been reading lots about recently).
In the meantime, here's a quick self-portrait I did on my lunchbreak.
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(Not) getting the most out of Twitter
blog Thursday 4th of September, 2008
I've had a couple of Twitter-related articles sitting around in my Evernote that I've been meaning to share for a while now. Daniel Schutzsmith (at the Barbarian Group) wrote about the twenty things he learnt using Twitter — with some pretty good points about using the service for both personal and professional work. And there's another good article (also in list form) by Margaret Mason, concerning etiquette in Twitter's relatively unique environment. As I say, they've been sitting around in my notebook for a while — and going back to them has got me thinking about the way I use Twitter, and specifically whether I'm getting all I want out of it.
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Braid
blog Monday 18th of August, 2008
Have you played Braid yet? This was not a game I was really looking forward to — I'd heard a few things about it before it launched, and seen a few screenshots, all of which had left me entirely unmoved. Thankfully, it was released through XBLA, and as such was contractually obliged to include a free demo version — because this is one of those games that needs to be played.
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Just Doing It
blog Tuesday 12th of August, 2008
I spent a whole bunch of my train journey yesterday chatting via IM to a good friend of mine about motivation. I'll admit straight out that I'm not somebody who has an easy time with self-motivation on side projects. I agree to do too many things for too many people, then find it difficult to get started on any of them — or find myself switching wildly between them, like I'm spinning plates. In fact, that's part of the reason I was so anxious to launch this site — I wanted to get it finished, out there, complete.
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Yoshitomo Nara + graf
blog Monday 11th of August, 2008
We visited the Baltic this weekend to check out the new Summer exhibitions. I spent the whole train journey from Newcastle to London (3.5 hours) attempting to put down in words my experience of Yoshitomo Nara and Graf's A-Z exhibition (short version, I liked it). Now I'm going to try and re-explain it without sounding like a wordy tosser, on the fast train from London to Milton Keynes (about 40 minutes).
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Orangina and Samsung lose at advertising
blog Thursday 7th of August, 2008
Okay, talking about bad TV advertising isn't exactly original — but seriously, the current batch is just too terrible for words.
Firstly, there's the insanely badly judged Orangina advert. Is this what we're doing now — freaky octopus women and anthromorphic mice juicing citrus fruits on their breasts?
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PixelJunk Eden
blog Sunday 3rd of August, 2008
As I mentioned last night, my PS3 hasn't seen a huge amount of use as a serious gaming machine. The reasons for this are straightforward enough — there haven't really been any exclusives of interest, unless you're the sort of person who enjoys the hideous controls and mind-numbing storylines of Metal Gear Solid (I'm not). Uncharted was a fun-but-only-once kind of experience, Motorstorm needed splitscreen to keep it going, and Haze was just plain shit. And multiplatform games are basically 360 games as far as I'm concerned, due to the generally lower prices and my controller preference. There's really nothing on the horizon either — until Little Big Planet rolls round, of course.
I do however have a big soft spot for some of the cheap, simple PSN games. PixelJunk Monsters (and its fiendish expansion pack, Encore) has made a particularly large dent in both mine and Kathryn's time. At heart, this game needed to be played by two players, sitting next to each other, preferably with a freshly-brewed cup of tea waiting to be drunk during the post-game postmortem. As such, we were both quite anxious to see whether Q Games' new PixelJunk release, Eden, would provide the same kind of experience — albeit in a totally different setting.
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Oh, hello
blog Wednesday 25th of June, 2008
Writing a 'welcome' post is the same as writing the introduction to anything else — fucking difficult. Starting an essay in school or college is exactly the same. Write a sentence, realise it's terrible, hold down backspace until you're back to square one. Repeat.
There are, of course, several major differences between a welcome post on a new site, and a college essay. For one thing, when I wrote my dissertation, I knew that at least one person was going to read it. More importantly, I didn't even think about the introduction until I was at least halfway through the body of the text. An essay is presented fully formed, refined out of sight over a period of time. To some extent, the same is true of this site — this is the third redesign of semiBad, but the first to be released for public display. I even managed to avoid starting at the beginning when it came to the content.
The whole thing, of course, is a matter of first impressions. When you meet someone for the first time, you get one shot — a moment, then it's over. Over time, you may change that impression, for better or worse. But in a blog entry, the possibilities are endless! You could spend your entire afternoon testing first impressions! You could spend the rest of the day, or weeks — or however long it takes to realise that you're sick of the layout, functionality, and sound of your new site, bin it, and move on to version four.
Matt Brown recently wrote about the difficulties of finding a voice online, more elegantly than I could. The alternative is to just publish, say hello, and accept that you might have some work to do changing people's impressions later.
Hello, I'm Andi. Welcome to semiBad.