Gaming: Continuing To Scrape The Barrel

In a world where ad-funded mobile gaming, purchasable downloadable content and the fact that people seem perfectly happy to pump millions of pounds into Candy Crush in exchange for extra lives compete for the last pennies in gamer's wallets, perhaps it was naïve of me to think that we'd hit the bottom. However, a rare trip into an actual physical shop that still sells PC games introduced me to a range of expansion packs for EA's The Sims 3 that actually managed to horrify me.

Expansion packs are nothing new to gaming and their quality often walks a debatable line between legitimately worthwhile extra content for a favourite game, or more likely, a combination of things that should have been included first time round and a ragbag selection of bonus features and in-game items. It's not unusual for new games to be released one month, along with some "limited edition" downloadable content for an additional cost, only to be followed up six months later with an add-on pack or two. In most instances, after the initial sales have started to die down the whole lot is then repackaged into a single "Game of the Year" edition and re-sold at premium prices.

In it ability to sell additional content, The Sims stands head and shoulders above its fellows. In the game, the player must control the day-to-day life of their avatar, or sim, and steer them to success or failure in their career, society and love life, while buying them products and furnishing their homes with an array of furniture. While it doesn't float my particular boat, the formula is incredibly successful, with The Sims 3 selling over 10 million copies worldwide, making it one of the most successful of all time. Even after the first game in the series, it didn't take EA long to work out that they could continue to profit for the game's success by creating a steady stream of purchasable expansion packs adding new sim models, career options, clothes, furniture or new ways and places for the sims it interact. To date, nineteen add-on packs have been released for The Sims 3 alone, with a twentieth scheduled for later this year.

It was three of those expansion packs that I chanced upon earlier. The first two, Showtime - Katy Perry Collector's Edition and Katy Perry's Sweet Treats are bad enough:

It's not that the idea of a computer game involving Katy Perry in itself is a bad thing - there are plenty of games that have involved musicians in the past, ranging from the various Moonwalker games (all pretty good) to the slightly less appealing KISS: Psycho Circus - The Nightmare Child - but that after reading through the actual content of the expansion packs themselves, there seems to be very little content actually involving Katy Perry. While Showtime does at least involve some musical content, such as a karaoke bar and stage-based career paths, Sweet Treats only lists Katy Perry-inspired items, like a cupcake-shaped guitar. As far as I could see, apart from the fact that Sweet Treats contains a "simlish" version of Perry's Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.), it looks like they've just slapped a (somewhat bizzare looking) picture of Katy Perry on the box to bump up the sales.

If you think I'm being overly cynical with the Katy Perry expansions - after all they are clearly aimed at kids and I suppose if it make them happy, then what the hell - it was the last expansion pack that really horrified me, the Diesel Stuff Pack:

In this pack, you're adding a range of Diesel-themed clothing and furniture items "showcasing the trends that are all the rage this season", which to me sounds like a translation for slapping the Diesel brand name all over your in-game world - for successful virtual living, perhaps. While I confess to be criticising without having actually played it, if you have any doubts, just read the product description on Amazon.

What annoys me about this, is that adding the Diesel brand name into the game, while presumably a profitable act for both EA and Diesel, is that you're adding very little to the actual game itself. Fine, releasing more items may improve the game for players and it's up to them if they want to pay for it, but is living in a Diesel monoculture actually any more fun? In buying this expansion pack, you're essentially paying to advertise Diesel to yourself. We've long seen product placement in other media and know how little value it adds - do the lingering shots of James Bond's Omega watch improve Casino Royale? Is it important which fast food retailer Tony Stark visited for his "American cheeseburger"? Will we really benefit from knowing Lara Croft wears a Wonderbra or that in Gears of War, real heroes drink Budweiser? I doubt it, but if we keep buying it, they're going to keep making it.

On a related note, a friend of mine used to work for Microsoft and told me that the day they introduced a purchasable Darth Vader mask for your X-Box Live avatar, they made about £10million in 24 hours.

I guess I'll look forward to Pokémon Apple and Pokémon Android, then.

The Rentokil Pestaurant

Or, a tale of how I ended up eating a scorpion in the Science Museum.

One of the things you tend to hear about the future is that due to the world getting busier, hotter and generally less poor, we're going to struggle to produce enough meat to satisfy everyone's demand.

Feeding meat-eaters is a costly affair compared to vegetarians, as meat takes considerably more resources to produce than most other foods. Think about it like this, in order to feed me bread, you have to grow, say, an acre of wheat, whereas in order to feed me steak, you have to grow enough grass to keep one cow alive for at least two years. Not only are you using more land, water and farming resource to produce the steak, but there's also other knock-on consequences, like an increased carbon footprint. Sadly for those of us who are meat-eaters, on this the vegetarians really do hold their annoying moral high ground.

In the West, we eat a lot of meat and therefore a lot of worldwide food resources go to feeding those animals rather than people. As developing countries get richer and lift their people out of poverty, in general their demand for meat will also increase and so we're looking at a world where there's more people, wanting more meat that we have already. Coupled with the fact that climate change will potentially have big impacts on our ability to produce all the crops we need, it looks like needing all this meat will become a problem.

There are lots of potential solutions to this though, from producing more climate-resistant crops to actually doing something about climate change (just throwing that one out there), but there's two other interesting alternatives:

The first is that we start producing meat without using animals to do it. The idea of lab grown, or in vitro meat has long been the stuff of science fiction but recently hit the headlines after the first in vitro beefburger was cooked and eaten at a news conference in London. Unfortunately for me, as the burger cost around $250,000 to produce, it's a little out of my price range to sample and so we come to the second alternative: insects.

Insects, bugs and other such creatures are a common protein source for all kind of people around the world. While the idea of chowing down on a daddy longlegs is somewhat off-putting for us in the West, people in other cultures enjoy a whole range of edible treats we are potentially missing out on. Some people think that if Westerners could be persuaded that eating at least some insect-based foods is ok, then we may not need to produce quite so much conventional meat in future.

For these reasons, and the fact that I'll generally eat anything, I've been wanting to eat some insects for a while. Feeding the world though has to be cheap, and looking online at where I could buy edible bugs produced what I would consider unreasonably expensive results. This is where the Science Museum comes in.

At this month's The Science of Food and Drink-themed Science Museum Lates event, one of the exhibitors was the Rentokil Pestaurant, Rentokil's very own world's first pop-up insect restaurant, inviting you to come and try the future of food. After a tip-off from a friend, I needed no further persuasion.

Now, before anyone gets too horrified, it's worth pointing out that Rentokil were not serving up insects that they had caught / killed themselves but instead served a range of more exotic imported bugs, farmed and fit for human consumption (well, so they said). But just because you can eat them, doesn't mean you'd want to - so how were they? Let's find out.

First on the list, while queuing up for the main courses, we tried some barbecue-flavour Bamboo Worms, deep-fried and covered completely in barbecue powder. While they were quite passable, they had very little texture and mainly just tasted of the barbecue flavouring, so it was difficult to start judging. If you're squeamish, you might want to skip to the end now, as it doesn't get much better from here.

Next up, a mixed bowl of assorted salt-and-pepper grubs (as you can see in the second picture above). I ate two of these but only because I didn't believe myself first time round. You know when you get that bit in a bag of crisps that's like a small bit of the potato has somehow avoided the whole crisp-making process but still made it into the bag, a kind of dark brown, lumpy, mud-flavoured blob? Well, that's what these tasted like, at best. (Or you can refer to my friend's slightly less measured opinion).

The next few samples, like the roasted, salted Queen Weaver Ants, were all somewhere in a middle ground between the first two tasters, but that soon changed when presented with the grasshoppers.

Going into this, I'd been fairly optimistic that being someone who's historically not squeamish in the slightest about eating any kind of food - and I've eaten some reasonably unusual things - that eating insects just wouldn't phase me. Turns out, I was wrong.

Each of the larger grasshoppers on the plate was about the size of my little finger. Picking one up and inspecting it, it looked exactly like a grasshopper. It wasn't coated in barbecue crumbs or an unintelligible shape, it was a two and a half inches long and definitely a grasshopper. Getting my brain to accept that I was going to eat this just did not want to happen. You never get anywhere without taking a few risks though, so after holding it stupidly for fifteen seconds or so, I took the plunge.

It would seem that for what grasshoppers lack in flavour, they more than make up for in texture. The grasshopper has virtually no flavour at all, but was like eating, well I don't know really, maybe very thin glass. The sensation of its crispy exoskeleton shattering as I chewed is not something I particularly want to repeat. Overall, I would rank the experience as horrid but worse was yet to come.

Being a sucker for punishment, and the vague notion that I "had" to do this "for science", or something equally silly, meant that I continued through the bug buffet and put the grasshopper to the back of my mind with a few chocolate-covered somethings. I can't remember what they were, but they weren't grasshoppers, which was good. However, upon reaching the end of the table something else caught my eye and it was with a grim realisation that I decided I was about to eat a scorpion.

There weren't many Chinese Armour Tail Scorpions from which to choose and, from the picture above, I picked the middle one. Holding it tentatively between my fingers, I looked at my friend, who had given up even before the grasshopper. He shook his head slightly in almost resigned understanding of what was about to happen. I looked at the girl next to me who was staring at me like I was out of my mind. It was decided, and in it went.

I say "in it went", but a scorpion is quite big, so I actually had to chew half of it off and eat that, which is easier said than done. It was a bit like eating a crabshell, but without the crab. Once I'd separated a mouthful, chewing it was near impossible and probably not advisable to anyone who doesn't drink enough milk. It crunched. It stabbed my gums. It tasted like bark, or mud, or something else distinctly inedible. It was awful. Why am I doing this to myself?, I thought. But I still ate it. It took a while before it was even possible to swallow and when I could, it was only as a way to get rid of it. I returned the uneaten half to the table and stepped away from this dreaded feast.

And so this brings us to the end of the tale of how I ended up eating a scorpion at the Science Museum. The scorpion was immediately followed by an emergency pint of cider and packet of crisps but the memory of it, and the grasshopper, still lingers.

So what did I learn? Is eating insects going to be our future? Well, based on my experience, I would say there's a lot of work to be done before that's likely to happen. I went into this about as open-minded as it's possible to be and have come out of it about as put-off as possible. Perhaps I shouldn't dismiss insects as food based only on my Pestaurant experience - it's not like Rentokil are generally known for their gourmet cuisine and maybe it's a bit like refusing to eat steak because you ate a bad hot dog once. Plenty of other people seemed much happier with their dinner than I did, so perhaps it's just me. Maybe I should wait until I'm somewhere that serves insects as part of their day-to-day life and see what the difference is.

In the meantime, I think I'll start saving for that in vitro burger.

I Get Pi (With A Little Help From My Friends)

One of the advantages of being (hopefully temporarily) unemployed is that you get a bit of time on your hands. Rather than spend my spare moments finding out what all the Breaking Bad-related fuss was about or recreating nostalgic childhood memories in Minecraft, I thought I'd try and do something a bit more productive.

As if almost by magic*, the kind folks at my old work saw fit to furnish me with one of these as a parting gift:

(*I may have given some hints.)

So, for the uninitiated, that's a Raspberry Pi, a kind of bare-bones, supercheap computer with which you can do all kinds of cool things.

As you can see though, it doesn't look much like your conventional laptop but all the basics in terms of the hardware are there, you're just missing the peripherals - screen, keyboard, hard drive etc. These can all be plugged in to the various slots around the unit: there's two USBs for mouse/keyboard/WiFi, an HDMI connector so you can plug it in to your TV and a slot underneath for SD cards (like you have in your camera), which serve as mini-hard drives. Once you've got all those plugged in, you're good to go.

While the use of the Raspberry Pi was originally intended as a cheap, risk free computer on which kids could learn to code, already in its relatively short lifespan it's been turned into all sorts of awesome things: a mini-Street Fighter 2 arcade machine, a quadcopter drone, cool music synths and even sent into space.

I think perhaps my ambitions for the Raspberry Pi lie a little closer to home though, so I'm going to start off trying to work out how to turn it into a home media centre, plugged into the TV, streaming music in from the internet and my other computers over the WiFi. Well, that's the plan anyway.

And if I get bored, who knows what geeky delights this might offer up:

Fire and Fortune

The product of a rainy Friday afternoon - my cover of Josienne Clarke and Ben Walker's song, Fire and Fortune.



If you haven't heard the original, it comes highly recommended. Josie and Ben are good friends of mine, winners of last year's Isambard Folk Award and recently graced Dermot O'Leary's show while at the Cambridge Folk Festival.

Fire and Fortune is the lead track from their new album of the same name, out now on Navigator Records. Hopefully, they are equally impressed and horrified by what I've done with their music. Just my way of saying "well done", guys!

Printing Me, Printing Guns

In preparation for their October exhibition "3D: Printing the Future", this week the Science Museum were offering the opportunity to come and get yourself 3D scanned by the guys from Digital Native Academy, so they could use your printed figurine in their upcoming displays.

Being a man of some leisure at the moment, it sounded pretty cool, so I paid them a visit. Hopefully, I should be getting a copy of my very own CAD file (or whatever format) of me too, so I'll be able to get a copy of myself printed!

It's amazing what you can do with an X-Box Kinect, lights, a big beast of a computer and custom made turntable.

Here's the results:

They wanted us to strike a pose, so I went for "Why, God, Why?!". Kind of like that bit from the end of Platoon.

Also at the Science Museum, they've got a copy of the "Liberator" 3D printed gun, famously created by Defense Distributed. If you haven't seen the ridiculous promo video for the Liberator on their website, you should definitely check it out. The only non-printed part is the metal firing pin.

Anyway, this particular model was apparently downloaded and printed by a Finnish journalist, was fired under supervision and, as you can see, didn't survive the first shot.   

3D printed guns sounds scary but at present actually creating your own copy of the Liberator isn't as easy as the media tends to make out - today's home printers just aren't up to the task yet so you'd either have to convince a company with industrial printers to make one for you, or buy your own industrial printer, which of course is far more expensive that just buying an actual gun.

That said, technology isn't a stationary thing, so 3D printed guns may soon become a everyday possibility, but they're not the only potential bad thing technologies like this may enable. There's a good article here by Cory Doctorow talking about some of the issues in regulation.

For me though, it's also worth remembering that Defense Distributed chose to release the Liberator at the height of the recent US debate on gun controls, in the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings. My view is that in doing so, they wanted to influence the debate to say "you want to take away our guns, but look, we can make our own anyway" and hence support the continuation of America's current rather lax gun controls. As their website says, their sole aim is to "defend the civil liberty of popular access to arms as guaranteed by the United States Constitution and affirmed by the United States Supreme Court".

Lastly, I was amused to see that one of the objects someone at the Science Museum had scanned was one of Games Workshops' Space Marine figures. I'm not sure Games Workshop would have approved...

Hadda Be Streamed Over Spotify

My European soverign-debt crisis reimagining of Alan Ginsberg's epic and visceral poem Hadda Be Playin' On The Jukebox. Enjoy!

Hadda Be Streamed Over Spotify

It had to be promulgated by the Daily Mail
It had to be recorded on Sky+
It had to be derided on Top Gear
It had to be played on your smartphone
Goldman Sachs & the IMF are in Cahoots

It had to be written in text speak
It had to be rerecorded for a US audience
Obama stretched & smiled & got double-crossed by House and Senate Republicans
Rich bankers with zero accountability
Money launderers in ECB working with money launderers from UK working with Wall Street syndicates Downtown New York

It had to be searchable on Google
It had to be endorsed by the record company
It had to be written in one hundred and forty characters or less
It had to be formatted for mobile
It had to be kettled in the park where students were protesting
It had to be read by politicians to TV cameras in working class areas
It had to be available as an app
It had to work as an emoticon
It had to raise the fees for a University education
It had to be written in blog posts, unattributed
It had to be on the frontpage of the Huffington Post
It had to be watched on Fox News
It had to be shouted out loud on in-store radio
It had to be uploaded to YouTube
It had to be iPhone ringing, Reality stars stop dead in the middle of a scene in New Jersey
It had to be novelist philosopher Ayn Rand & Alan Greenspan Chairman of the Federal Reserve meeting in East 36th Street N.Y. together Saturdays since the 50’s reported posthumously VICE magazine

It had to be the IMF & Goldman Sachs together
Started War on Greek insolvency & Spanish housing debt crisis headlines
It had to be Credit Ratings Agencies & the IMF
Sold all that austerity in Europe
It had to be ECB & Conservative Politicians working together in Cahoots "against the Socialists"
Kept Silvio Berlusconi out of Jail economising Sicily Mediterranean drug trade
It had to be Goldman goons and Lucas Papademos’ concealing spiralling national debt credit default swap index
It had to be ringing on Cayman Island Cash registers
World-wide laundry for off-shore Corporate money
It had to be IMF & Goldman Sachs & ECB together
Bigger than Europe, bigger than Law.
It had to be a stamped boot full of profit
It had to be secrets and lies a solid mass of greed
It had to be a cold black heart, a glint in the corner of an eye
It had to be in Draghi’s brain
It had to be in Monti's mouth
It had to be sanctioned by America
Wall Street "conservatism" the IMF Goldman Sachs off-shore money ECB Credit Ratings Agencies & Multinational Corporations
One big set of Corporate gangs working together in Cahoots
Hedge Fund banksters everywhere unmoderated, on the make
Greed drunk
Ruthless
Filthy Rich

On top of a Slag heap of countries, Economic Cancer, financial smog, garbage cities, grandas' pensions, Fathers' resentments
It had to be the One Percent wanted money and power and they got everything
Wanted redefined status quo, wanted Ireland, wanted austerity
Wanted Spanish unemployment
Wanted technocracies in Greece and Italy

It had to be IMF & Goldman Sachs & the ECB
Multinational Capitalists' privatised public services, "Private security Agencies for the One Percent"
And their Funds, Debts and Futures Commodities Trading.
It had to be Capitalism the Vortex of this debt, provoke competition man to man, libraries closed in poor areas, London burns & rumbles, Hedge Funds, austerity cuts across oceans, impoverishing Mediterraneans, bail out the debt then Wall Street Traders pillage all over again
Greece's ancient democracy bumped off with IMF promises & praises, a warning to European governments

Politicians embraced for decades
The Federal Reserve & ECB keep each other’s secrets
Goldman Sachs & Standard and Poor’s never hit their own
Wall Street & IMF one mind-brute force
World-wide, and full of money

It had to be greed, It had to be unaccountable, It had to be endorsed at the highest levels
It had to impoverish in Greece 9,000,000
It had to impoverish in Spain 47,000,000
It had to impoverish in Portugal
It had to impoverish in Italy
It had to impoverish in Ireland

And It had to impoverish in the United Kingdom

Looking Forward Uncertainly

So, I thought it was about time I explained why I called my blog Looking Forward Uncertainly.

Before I can do that, you probably need to know (if you don't already) that I'm a musician and have been in a band called Capulets for, well, quite some time. We've been a bit off and on over the last couple of years as after our last drummer moved to Scotland, my main collaborator in the band, Pete, rather unreasonably decided to both do an MA and get married. Despite these testing circumstances, Pete and I have managed to keep things ticking over in the background on days when he wasn't reading, psychoanalysing or deciding what kind of flowers went with bridesmaid's dresses. Hopefully we're now starting to get things back on track, so watch this space, so to speak.

So, why Looking Forward Uncertainly? Well, it's the title of a song of mine, written back in 2007, on a melancholic train journey heading Northward out of London and a late night a week or so later.

The title itself actually came from an article I read in some free literary magazine I picked up in Soho (remember those?), in which it was printed in massive blue letters across a whole page for no apparent reason. I liked it so much I pinned it to my fridge and kept trying to find a use for it in things I was writing. In the end, it just seemed to fit perfectly with this song, so I stole it wholesale for the title.

As an expression though, "looking forward uncertainly" seems to encapsulate something of what I perceive as the current mood and of the both the hope and the doubt that we feel when trying imagine or understand how the future might pan out. When I started this blog, those are the ideas I wanted to explore, so it seemed like a good opportunity to steal the expression all over again.

The song Looking Forward Uncertainly, however, addresses a topic a little closer to my heart and while I don't want to give too much away (the meaning is in the eye of the beholder, after all), I will say that it's a bit of rare one for me, in that I don't often write about myself and, well, like I said, I was a bit melancholic at the time...

I've added the lyrics in down below and you can listen to the original version of the song via the soundcloud link at the bottom (recorded in one take at about 3am on the night I wrote it). Enjoy!

Looking Forward Uncertainly

Tonight I dream of the radio telescopes
Giving me hope
I imagine a Universe
A coil, spiralling upwards

I could dream of the future, but I can't find something useful
Leonard Cohen sang Hallelujah, but it don't mean anything to you

You're drifting away
You're drifing through space

Telescopes from this moment on
And if I look in the same direction
Then I can see what they can see
The future mapped out in front of me

I could dream of the future, but I can't find something useful
Leonard Cohen sang Hallelujah, but it don't mean anything to you

You're drifting away
You're drifing through space