Home truths.....

This week, I have mostly been discovering that I am no longer as young as I once thought I was!

To quote Samuel.L.Jackson, "Example...."

On Monday, on Radio One, it was announced that this week was Dubstep week. This basically entailed all the Radio One D.Js' promoting Dubstep and playing examples of the genre whilst also guiding listeners to the Radio One Website where you could play around with some bangin' tunes and sound effects yourself and lay down your own Dubstep track with some pretty funky beats. Monday night also saw Dubstep artist Nero playing alongside the British Philharmonic Orchestra for a one-off performance on Zane Lowe's show. Remembering how Portishead once did something similar with the New York Philharmonic, (as did Metallica I do believe > Actually I have been informed it was the San Francisco Philharmonic with Metallica!< ), I thought I'd check it out. Needless to say I was not overly impressed!

I think I must just not be cool enough for school to listen to Dubstep! The Philharmonic Orchestra was awesome but the bits with Nero really just didn't seem to fit! With Portishead it worked and, from what I have heard of the sessions with Metallica, this also was pretty awesome and amazing. With Nero....not so much! I really don't think I get the whole Dubstep Genre....it just sounds like a more grimey version of Drum And Bass of which I am not paticularly a fan but have heard a few decent examples. (I'm thinking here of a Drum And Bass version of Careless whisper I own on a Ministry of Sound album!)

It makes me sound old I know but Dubstep mostly just sounds like a noise to me! One of the worst tracks around at the minute, and apparently one of the most recent examples of Dubstep, is The Bass Cannon which, to me, just sounds like mental torture! I have to change stations whenever this comes on ~ it is just atrocious!!!!

The other reason why I think I am getting old is because on Tuesday night, traditionally the night before me having two and a half days off from work, I decided, as per usual, to play Xbox. Not a problem except that I was close to completing the main storyline on Fable 2 and was determined to finish it so that I can Download the extra content for next week on my two weeks off from work. Hmmm....well, anyway, I finished playing at 3:45 am Wednesday morning!

Wednesday I was fine but Thursday, I felt like I had a hangover! I went to bed fairly early on Wednesday night and got a good nights sleep, more than I normaly get on average, and yet still all day I felt exhausted with the fringes of a headache just bordering on the edges of my frontal lobes! I really must start to learn that I am no spring chicken any more and cannot keep behaving like I am still in my twenties! My main problem ~ I am still a really big kid!! The thing is.....I'm not sure I'm ever gonna learn........

Silly Sparky......xxxxxxx

It's only a game......

Why are some people soooo obssessed with their Gamer scores on Xbox Live? True, it is nice to have lots of G Points but who REALLY cares if you have a lower score? Not me! I get just as much enjoyment if not more out of just playing a game rather than trying to get all the achievments.

For those who are unitiated in the ways of the Xbox360, when you play a game on your console you can earn up to 1000 points per game for performing certain achievments. These can be anything from completing individual levels of a game to rolling your car 5 times or achieving a certain amount of head-shots. For every game the maximum amount of points you can get is 1000 but often some of these achievments can only be done by playing multi-player games online or completing a game on Hard mode! Sometimes a game only has 5 achievments, such as completing every successive level in a game, but these still have to add up to 1000 points so you can see sometimes it is easier to get all the achievments on a game than on others.

One of the women at work, call her Bea, has a husband who requested to be my Xbox friend; this means we can see when each other is Online and what game we are each playing and also can look at each other's Gamer Cards which record our scores. Lately she has become obsessed because my score was only like 3000-something. She and her husband lent me this game where you only had to play 5 minutes and press  one button to get all achievments and an easy 1000 points. Fair enough. But they also lent me Terminator:Salvation and told me it was easy and that their kid completed it in like 3 hours or something. Both games were lent me so that I could "get my score up!"

So okay, I load it in and yes, it is fairly easy but it is slow to load and you can't skip the cut-scenes between playing so that every time you die and reload your last save, you have to sit through them all again! Boring!! I like played it for an hour, got a bit bored and went back to Batman:Arkham Asylum which I had nearly finished and was enjoying more instead!


Anyway, I bump into her today and Bea is like "So what's taking you so long with Terminator?" and I'm like "Well, like....I've not played it since Tuesday night because I was trying to get to the end of Batman!" and so she's like "Well I'm going to get my own Profile and I'm going to like thrash your score really quickly and beat you!" and so I'm like "Big Fracking deal!"

{Aparently, her and her husband were watching my Profile the other night to see how many Achievments I got on the games they lent me. Errr...like...hello? Sad much?}


I mean this woman is older than me and always bitching about her husband playing like loads of Xbox but still is giving me shit because my Gamerscore is a little low. And I'm like thinking "Jeez girl...back off and get a life!" I mean I like Xbox as much as the next guy but I want to enjoy my games not just play them to build up points on my profile! And maybe it's just me but as much as it might be nice to have a high score, I have a life you know and cannot be arsed obsessing about how I can get more bragging points which is basically all G-points are! They are no good for anything else!


Well, I know you are all bored now with my geeky Xbox talk so I'll wrap this up but honestly....when you start getting that obsessed with G-points, and not just your own or your husbands but someone elses, then you really need to have a harsh word with yourself! I mean there are other things I like doing too, yeah? Like spending time with my wife and daughter or reading...I mean it's not like I've got two ton of books to get through or anything? Friends from RISI will know all about that little obsession, I'm sure!


Anyway, until later......wah wah wah wah wah.....Game Over!


C U Next Time Blog Pals xxxx NarkyMarky