Ben Paddon

Category: Uncategorized

  • The Springfield Files

    I’ve had an idea for a website in the back of my head for a while now, but I lack the know-how (or, indeed, the encyclopedic knowledge) to put it together. So I’ll outline it here, and maybe someone much smarter than me can put it together.

    The basic idea is this: With so many episodes of The Simpsons, it can sometimes be tricky remembering which episode your favourite moment happened in. Or maybe you remember a few elements of an episode but you can’t remember which episode specifically it was. The solution to this idea is simple: A website that allows you to basically input what happened and have it spit out the relevant episode.

    The syntax would be “The one where [character] [action] [modifier]“. Those three variables would be drop-down menus, with the options [action] and [modifider] changing to reflect the selected options in the previous drop-downs. For example you could set [character] to “Homer”, and then [action] would consist of a list of vague things like “joins the Navy” or “starts a bowling team”, or specific things like “gets stung on the bottom by a bee” or “dreams he’s a giant made of solid gold”.

    Once you’ve set your three variables, you then click a button that says something pithy like “Find it!” and you are taken to a page that says “Were you thinking of… [episode title]?” and accompanies it with a short TV Guide-esque synopsis of the episode, the original airdate, the season it’s included in (with a link to buy the relevant box set on Amazon) and links to the episode on Wikipedia, IMDB, and whichever Simpsons wiki people actually use. If the thing in question occurred in multiple episodes (e.g. “The one where Marge gets a job”, or “The one where Bart falls in love”) it gives you a list of the episode titles, which you can click on to view the aforementioned details.

    The coding of such a site probably wouldn’t be too difficult for someone in the know. The really time-consuming thing would be sitting down to watch every single episode (and the movie) and writing down everything that every single character does.

    Anyway, this idea has been floating around my noggin for some time now, and I’m glad to finally get it out of my skull.

  • My thoughts on the Microsoft Kinect Cirque Du Soleil event

    Tonight I dragged my Dad down into deepest darkest Los Angeles to the Galen Center where we watched a bunch of people in tights dance around trying to sell us Microsoft’s latest toy, the controllerless motion controller Kinect for the Xbox 360. I was expecting a bit less pitch and a bit more Cirque Du Soleil, but what we got was pretty well balanced for the most part. It was an entertaining night that importantly didn’t actually cost us anything. But what did we take away from the event?

    Well to start with, there was my Dad’s attitude (and please don’t mistake that for the negative meaning of the word). He walked away from the event with tears in his eyes. he was very clearly moved by a lot of the imagery and the performance pieces, what few there were, of the evening, and for one brief moment – the appearance of an apparently in-game lightsaber duel with Darth Vader, no less – he actually considered buying a 360 with Kinect.

    They’ve done it, I thought at that moment. Microsoft have won.

    That changed, however, on the walk to the bus stop. I was talking to my Dad and asking him what he thought about the pitch, and his stance was clear – there wasn’t any point in him buying a 360 with Kinect, he told me. After all, he already has a Wii.

    I withdraw Microsoft’s victory.

    This is the sort of person both Microsoft and Sony has to impress and ultimately win over – the older, more casual gamer who probably owns a Wii and nothing else. Who uses the Wii for Wii Sports and maybe a few other games like Mario Party 8 or, in moments of lapsing sobriety, WarioWare: Smooth Moves. This sort of person may not really be impressed by Kinect or the PlayStation Move. They’ve seen it already, as far as they’re concerned. They’ve already played bowling with their TV. They’ve probably already done the archery thing. This “revolutionary new way” to play games is not, to my Dad and potentially millions of others like him, particularly revolutionary.

    The only thing that appealed to my Dad on the journey home was the HD element, and even then he couldn’t see paying $300 just to play the games he already has on his Wii in higher definition. Besides, he’s already rather happy with the way his TV upscales the Wii.

    As for me? Well, I wasn’t sold on Microsoft’s glorified EyeToy before and I’m still not entirely convinced. I’m more likely to buy the PlayStation Move if I buy either option, largely because whether I’m moving around or not I like to feel a controller in my head. But then I’m probably not even going to get Move for a while.

    After all, I already have a Wii.

  • I’m On a Train

    It’s late and I’m currently in the top bunk of the Antrak Starlight North to Seattle. We left at 10.15 this morning and we arrive on Thursday evening. And then on Fridqy comes PAX, easily the best games convention in the US. The highlight of my gaming social calendar.

    Joining me is Michelle Osorio, who’ll be entering the Rock Band tournament along with friends Andy and Adam to form the greatest band of all time – the Paxstreet Boys.

    Chief concern right now is making sure I dot fall out of this bunk. I’m sleepy and eager to get to Seattle.

  • Computer Seperation Anxiety

    We’ve moved into a new house. We haven’t got any Internet yet and we’ve only just figured out where the movers put our computers, so it may be a while before I can get online to do things like update Jump Leads or write Ficlys or anything like that.

    I do still have my phone, and indeed I have my Skype account which routes calls to my phone if I’m offline, so I’m not completely out of touch. I wouldn’t mind some human contact at some point in the immediate future.

  • “Would you like a Jelly Baby?”

    I’m back in the UK, and have been for about two and a half weeks, traveling around and generally seeing the sights with Michelle, which has been an absolute delight. Together we’ve seen much of London, a lot of Bath, the best bits of Liverpool and, so far, a bit of Edinburgh. It’s been fantastic and I couldn’t ask for a better travel companion, but there is one disappointment that has surfaced as a result of this trip.

    I have discovered (or, perhaps more accurately, re-discovered) that I am allergic to Jelly Babies.

    It’s quite devastating. I’ve always been drawn to them. They’re quite possibly the single finest sweet the UK has to offer, and so when I see them I invariably end up buying a bag and deciding that I’m going to make it last a few days. Then, within an hour, I’m staring at an empty bag thinking to myself, “Ah well, maybe next time.”

    Then I start to feel quite Sick.

    Now, you could look at that scenario and say, “But Ben! You’ve just eaten an entire bloody bag of Jelly Babies. Of course you feel sick.” Allow me to expound on Sick. Sick is not just an upset stomach. Sick is not just a sleepless night. Sick is three, maybe four days of inconsistent stomach cramps, a sore throat and, depending on the weather, the occasional headache. Let me try to quantify the feeling for you. Imagine that, just before you go to bed, you discover that your stomach has been removed and replaced by a haggis, your throat feels like it’s played host to a horny hedgehog and his cheesegrater lover, and your head feels like it’s been closed for necessary repair works by loud, heavy, annoying repairmen who have been itching to try out their new jackhammer.

    It’s quite unpleasant, and I go through it every time I have a bag of Jelly Babies (or more than one pack of Rowntree’s Fruit Bastilles, which leads me to believe that maybe it’s an allergy to gelatin). And yet somehow I manage to forget this every time I see a bag of Jelly Babies, up until the point where I’m doubled over on the bed clutching my stomach and groaning like a very talkative caveman with a lot to share.

    Oh well. It’s worth it.

  • “We Ain’t Found Shit”

    I recently decided to have another look at scifi-comedy, past and present. There’s a lot of it I’m already familiar with – Red Dwarf and The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy are not only what I consider to be pinnacles of the genre but are also at the top of my list of favourite novels and TV shows, and the Back To The Future trilogy is, I think, the best trilogy ever commited to film – but there’s some stuff I haven’t seen. I’ve only seen about four episodes of Hyperdrive for instance, and although it’s not fantastic it’s hardly as bad as most Red Dwarf fans seem to think.

    A big example of scifi-comedy, one that has always been recommended to me, is Spaceballs. I’m a fan of Mel Brooks and yet I’d never seen this film. Thankfully it’s on Netflix’ Watch Instantly service, so I added it to my queue and loaded it up on my Xbox.

    Oh dear.

    It’s one of those films that I imagine was rip-roaringly funny when it first came out, but the entire thing felt really badly hewn together. The jokes were flat and uninspired, leaving me feeling that the horrendous Date Movie would have been a better choice – I laughed once during the entire film, and that was when Tim Russ, whilst combing the desert, angrily declared that he had been thus far unable to locate anything with his giant comb.

    He was a little more succinct with his report.

    The conclusion I drew from this was that Spaceballs is a terrible, terrible movie. I’m sure it wasn’t once upon a time, but now it’s awful. This film, this terrible catastrophe of a motion picture, left me wondering if Mel Brooks has ever been as funny as I thought he was. The first film of his that I saw as a kid was Robin Hood: Men In Tights, which I adored, but that hasn’t aged well either. Was I wrong? Has Mel Brooks always been terrible?

    I inadvertantly found myself watching The Producers two weeks later. I was, in fact, trying to watch the fourth season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, the last episode of which contains some chunks of the Broadway musical (season four sees Larry David getting cast in the show by Brooks and partially revolves around the rehearsal process). I watched…

    …and I laughed. A lot.

    And my faith was restored.

    Earlier this week I picked up Blazing Saddles on DVD. This was my favourite Brooks film until I’d seen The Producers, and once again I find myself too scared to watch it. I don’t want to ruin the memory I have of it being a fantastic, funny film. I ruined ThunderCats by going back and re-watching it on DVD. I ruined Mighty Morph’n’ Power Rangers by watching clips of it on YouTube. Somehow clinging on to the nostalgia is more important to me than trying to prove myself that the film was worth watching the first time ’round.

    Y’know what? I think I’ll watch it tonight. Hopefully it’s still funny. Dear Glod, I hope it’s still funny.

  • Ambition

    I drew a picture for Dinosaurs Fucking Robots (warning: potentially NSFW) about a week or so ago and sent it their way. I don’t know whether they’re going to use it at all considering it’s more representative of the potential for robot-dinosaur relations rather than the actual act itself, but I’ve decided to share it here for those of you interested in… in that sort of thing.

     

    Ambition

  • That Album Cover Thing

    It’s not a new meme, but it does seem to be doing the rounds again. You get the name of your band from the first article that pops up using Wikipedia’s Random article feature, the name of their first album from the last five or so words from the bottom quote that pops up on a random quotes list generated by the Quotations Pages, and the cover artwork from the third picture currently displayed on the Explore the Last 7 Days link on Flickr.

    All in all, I think I got quite lucky.

    vices