Excessive Opinions

I’ve been in France that last couple days.

Paris is a bit of a shithole, dispite that though everything is ridiculously expencive.

A couple illegal asylum seakers were found on our coach on the way back, which is slightly cool but also rether annoying as it meant spending forever at the border control in France trying to sort everything out and not get arrested ourselves.

Got some booze at the absolutely massive supermarket place, but most electronics and cigerettes and stuff were overpriced dispite the duty-free.

A “continental” breakfast is NOT breakfast. It’s just fucking bread.

That pretty much sums it up. Sorry I’ve not been posting much but I’ve not too much to say lately.

Eating at Wagamuma’s is an odd experience. It’s an London based organisation which in all attempts completely fails to shrug this fact off. Serving food which utilises Japanese cuisine in a heavily altered way so that our western bodies can handle it, this is definitely a weird place.

Sitting down in this English establishment, being served Americanised foods prepared by part time cooking students we’re presented with chopsticks. Looking around, our waiters are all “hipster” university dropouts who think they’re fully justified to have chosen an art degree in the first place; they believe that sushi actually means “raw fish” and proclaim their love mother earth while they smoke it. These rapists of Asian culture all assume that everyone going to what they think is an actual Japanese “restaurant” will obviously know how to use chopsticks. Asking for a familiar utensil is useless in this place.

The notion that despite eating food which is actually available in every supermarket across Britain, you’re suddenly obliged to use chopsticks is something this company wishes to shove down your throats. Something which annoys me.

I look outside and I don’t’ see the beautiful landscape commonplace when picturing the strange faraway culture this food is claiming to originate from. No, I see five chavs hanging outside a Subway, about 6 Starbucks and a Primark.

Americanised food prepared by subpar chefs, served to me by English hipster students in knee high socks, sitting in a modern style “restaurant.” My elbows sharing space with a graphic designer talking to his soon-to-be-client on my right and to my left someone of Chinese background who hasn’t ever left England trying to show off to his girlfriend that he is all orient and cool by choosing this place to host his date. I don’t quite feel like by using a fork I’m really breaking the atmosphere.

I eat my food and I drink my imported beer. I pay about twice what a Chinese takeout would cost, about twelve times what it would cost to make this food at home and probably actually about equal to the cost of flying over to Japan would be on Ryanair or Easyjet. And I leave the restaurant still hungry.

OK so over the past two weeks or so, I’ve been hearing “Fireflies” everywhere. Every bloody shop seems to have added it to their mandatory playlsit. My friends are linking me to the YouTube video and people seem to love it.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not bad it’s just not really any good. I listen to it and I can’t find the will to turn it off but I don’t exactly enjoy it. The lyrics don’t make any sense, the tune seems to be some defult GarageBand song and the singer kinda reminds me of every indie YouTuber out there.

There’s no surprise that Owl City itself originates from a parents basement, way back in 2007 when insomniac Adam Young started putting stuff on Myspace. Now that no one uses Myspace I do wonder where the slightly hipster slightly middle class overly mothered children of the future are going to attempt to try and become pop stars. I guess we just have to wait for a Music version of Twitter to evolve from the dying remnents of Tom’s last social media based breath. “2.0… Will live on… “

Basically, I’m not going to be contributing any of the money thrown into The Portal Service and Imogen Heap’s latest music lovechild. But I won’t lose my mind if I hear “Fireflies” the next time I’m in a Starbucks.

I know it’s a bit late, but Steam’s had a Shattered Horizon free weekend the past couple days. I’ve had a about two hours or so playing altogether, so these thoughts are only preliminary.

The controls are a bit hard; as I have a terrible mouse it’s almost impossible for me to aim. (this is a laptop so I’m just not used to using an external mouse. Most games seem to adjust the sensativity automatically but having a try at that manually on this I can’t quite get it right.)

I really love the simulated sound, it’s pretty realistic and the ability to turn your electrical equipment off is kind off amazing. The game’s basic concept is, simply put, “You’re in space… Shooting other people who are in space.” Which, I like.

Obviously as it’s the free weekend the servers are finding it hard to handle the excess players. Connecting is hard and often the pings are astronomically high. I reckon normally it’d be a bit better but reguardless, it’s a fun play.

I do have a thing for completely multiplayer games, though. And the whole space thing is just handled brilliantly, I think. So yeah, I’m buying this game.

I know what I said but I lied.

I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place, it’s frustrating and painful; it means I can’t update here for a while. Just hold on and wait for me to fight through this.

I’ll start updating properly soon.