10th November, 2008 (11:44 pm)
The Day With More Disney (1)
We had so much fun. Like, a crazy amount of fun. I’m sure most people reading here have been to one Disneyland or another (the particular flavour to the left is Disneyland Paris, although if someone dropped you in the middle of a Disney Park you’d be hard-pressed to identify specifically which one, know what I mean?) but - I swear it - you won’t ever properly experience Disneyland until you take your kids there. It’s . . . well, I might as well go for the cliche: it was magical.
I visited Disneyland during my stay in California many, many years ago, but that was just a totally different thing. Although I love Disney (no, really - it’s my secret shame: all you have to do is play the end of Beauty and the Beast and I’ll burst into tears and prove it), I don’t recall our Disney trip being anything remotely like what I experienced recently. Not a word of a lie, we didn’t step foot in the overly-cutesy Fantasyland the entire time we were there - no, honestly. Why would we? At that time it was about the adrenalin and drinking and talent-spotting, and my friend K and I weren’t remotely interested in Tea Cups or Small Worlds. We didn’t watch the Parade, or cuddle a character, or do anything you’re supposed to when you go to Disneyland. We were too busy trying not to throw up on Space Mountain and following cute guys around the park. (An aside: the drive home from Anaheim was an experience. At that time I was too young to drive a hire car in the States, so K had to take the drive back to LA on her own, me sat fidgeting next to her. Our friend F had given us very clear, detailed directions to get us there and back safely, only neither she nor we realised that the freeway would be closed for maintenance that night, sending us out on a rolling detour to the darker parts of CA. On top of getting lost, it put several hours on our already lengthy journey home and we only stayed awake by singing - loudly - the complete tracklist of Oasis’ Morning Glory into the night air around our convertible Mustang. Quite a feat, considering we both sing like tone-deaf banshees being stabbed with hot pokers).
Anyway.
Even now, almost three weeks after coming back, S talks about our time in Paris - obsesses about our time there. And no, this might not sound impressive - three weeks? So?? - but trust me . . . five-year-olds generally have the recall of brain-damaged goldfish. Only this morning, as he padded into my bedroom, all tousled and tired and clutching his soft Mickey Mouse, the first words from his mouth? “I miss Disneyland, Mummy.” That was before he said hello, before our good morning kiss. Disneyland has touched him in a place so special, so deep he may never forget it.
Heh. Isn’t that awesome?
Oh, it wasn’t that fantastic - not from a parent’s perspective, anyways. There were 459065 billion over-priced shops and restaurants charging crazy ass prices and if I ever hear the Happy Halloween Song again I’ll punch Halloween Mickey in the face. The queues were stupid, and three separate rides - Crushers’ Coaster, the Tram Tour and Big Thunder Mountain - all broke down at the exact same time we had Fast Passed or queued ready to get on. Although my French is passable I nonetheless struggled across the language barrier, and it’s hard to keep your temper when rude, selfish children are pushing into or past your gentle little boy. I broke my heart when our friends left - worse than when they left for France to begin with, worse that when I left them after staying with them in July - and their absence on the final day was felt all around us, leaving me sad and empty, like a deflated party balloon.
Yet when I look back now, downloading video and uploading photos, my stomach swells with . . . it sounds stupid, I know, but it swells with pride. Little S queued so patiently, behaved so impeccably, gaped so wordlessly, agog at the bright, gorgeous faux world set against the searing, flawless china-blue sky . . . well, it’s hard to feel anything but. I simply feel enveloped with love and happiness and it reminds me, for all the humdrum day-to-day stuff that makes me yell at S and scream at M, there’s nothing I love more than spending time with my boys. I’m so blessed to have my gorgeous little boy, my kind, selfless husband, my funny, generous friends. So for every time S looks back at the magic of this trip, recalls the time he met the ‘real’ version of his most cherished cuddly toy, or shot the stars and skies on the Buzz Lightyear ride, or any one of the other hundred things he did and loved . . . I’ll be doing exactly the same.
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25th October, 2008 (1:02 pm)
The Day After Disneyland (20)
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13th September, 2008 (11:18 am)
The Day The Picture Says It All (16)
I was doing well with the whole blogging thing there, wasn’t I? Almost had a pattern down. Had a whole heap of bloggy-rich material to talk to you about, questions to ask, opinions to pose. But really, none of those things matter. Not when I look at this picture and see how close we were to losing everything.
Go on, click on it - see the bigger version. Yes, that’s my back garden. Yes, that’s my lawn waving like seaweed beneath two foot of dirty water. Yes, that’s my bin languishing on my patio. Even though you can see grass at the end of the lawn, don’t let that fool you; our lawn slopes down towards the house, and the little fence you see behind the wall - see it? our one attempt at trying to prettify our garden - is actually not that little. It’s just that the flood water makes it look little. The photo was taken by my husband as he balanced on the threshold of our back door, moments before he shut it and frantically piled towels, sheets and blankets against the bottom to keep the rising water out.
I say my husband because I wasn’t here. I’d traveled to London for a meeting and got as far as Paddington station when M called me, high-pitched and scared, to tell me what was happening. M shouldn’t even have been home but the roof collapsed at his work under the weight of a month’s worth of torrential rain hitting it in a few hours and they all got sent home. I don’t know which is worse; being a hundred and fifty miles away, as I was, lost and scared and useless, or being there and seeing it happen in real-time and still being useless. But then I couldn’t get home. Train after train was cancelled and I was just stuck, stuck in that station, stuck doing nothing - and I am SHIT at doing nothing. I’m a doer. I take action. Even when there’s no action to take that’s what I do because I don’t know how to do anything else. So I was calling my financial advisor, asking about my buildings insurance - the buildings insurance I’d let lapse in May because I’m a dumbass and only renewed SIX DAYS PREVIOUSLY - and calling M, and calling my Dad, calling anyone, anything to make myself feel useful and controlled instead of stuck and stupid and scared.
Our back fence is fucked, as is our shed. I don’t care much about the latter as it was only full of shit, but our garden furniture, purchased only last year, is also FUBARed, along with most of S’s bikes/scooters/cars that you can’t see but were behind the house and to the right of the picture. Our garage was also flooded and while a good three-quarters of that was also full of crap, the remaining quarter was important; old LPs, bags of clothes for goodwill, our lawnmower, paint, tools, etc. We have our washing machine in there, too, and while it appears to be still working, I’m told that it probably won’t be for much longer.
We escaped being flooded inside our home by an inch. It looks crazy, written like that - one, single, inconsequential inch - but that’s the honest Christ’s truth. When the fire service arrived and started pumping the fuck out of this inexplicable water, the river in our backyard was lapping the underside of our doorstep. We live in Surburbia, on a quiet, 12-house cul-de-sac that backs onto a main A road. I’m told that at the top of the road a culvert burst, sending water pouring down the road, flooding cars, sweeping stuff away, and four out of the six houses that back onto the road were flooded. We were one of two that escaped with just a fucked fence and a soggy lawnmower.
So, I had grand plans to update you on the weekend I spent with two of my best friends and their partners, getting drunk and indoctrinating them into the wondrous world of Rock Band. And the weekend I went to London with my girlfriends, against my better judgment, to watch the stage show Dirty Dancing. (Afterward I wished I’d listened to my doubts; it was appalling - like really, truly, horribly dreadful - and sat only five rows from the front, I had to duck each time Johnny “Not Remotely As Attractive As Patrick Swayze” Castle turned my way as the sight of his omnipresent but unflinching erection made me want to chunder.) I wanted to talk about how strangely depressed I get when I realise people have de-linked me (I’m 32, for fuck’s sake - does it matter? Well, no, not really, but I can’t help how I feel - WHY OH WHY, WHAT HAVE I DONE?!) and how on Thursday night we went to the O2 Arena to see soul legend Stevie Wonder in concert, and M and I managed to spend twenty-four hours with each other without wanting to purchase a gun. They were good times, ladies and gentlemen - good times. But then I look at that photo taken on September 5th and everything else seems shallow and stupid and ridiculously inane.
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27th August, 2008 (3:43 pm)
The Day With the Dancing and Dr. Who (12)
I think we’ve just about recovered from our trek across the country to see George Michael’s (allegedly) final UK arena show. As M’s work wouldn’t give him the day off following the bank holiday weekend (bastards), we had to drive to London and back all on the same day. This meant that I got home at 2am the morning of my return to work. Heh.
It was a sheer fluke that we got the tickets at all. I was home the day they went on sale but by the time I got through on the priority line for Ticketmaster at 9.02am they’d already sold out, and the website was crapping out errors and time-outs like nobody’s business. So I’d kind of resigned myself to missing it but kept doing that random refresh that netheads do, just on the off-chance the page may load, and then on the off-chance the page did load. I hyperventilated and promptly booked the tickets before the website changed it’s mind, and a few weeks later two shiny, purple Final Two tickets fell through my letterbox. AWESOME. I didn’t even have to get one of those bolloxy restricted view places or pay £200+ tickets either - for £50 each we were sat smack bang in the middle at the back of the top tier. This meant that we had a fantastic view of the entire stage, albeit with Michael left looking a bit ant-like due to the distance. But I could live with that!
We got there really early, though. M gets a bit anal about travel/parking times etc., so thanks to an early start after dropping S off at my in-laws and a clear drive, we had five hours to kill when we got there. FFS. :p So we had a walk around, a drink and some food, and managed to spend the entire day together, just the two of us, without one wanting to murder the other. And because it was, like, THERE, we went to the Dr. Who exhibition - WITHOUT OUR SON. (I’m sad to report that after suffering through three series’ worth of the Doctor and Rose and Donna and crap-actor-Martha (S isn’t interested in Chris Eccleston, so we haven’t seen S1) I’ve been infected by the Who bug. How embarrassing.) I felt awful about going without him at our side, but wtf IT WAS RIGHT THERE! We toyed about how to approach it; lie and pretend that we didn’t go, fib and say we HAD to go or simply cough up the truth. In the end we plumped for the latter, so after I gave him his pressies and showed him the (bad phone) photos, I asked if he was cross that we went without him. He cuddled me and said no, course not, he got the best pressies which is just as good! Bless. :) We bought him an exhibition guide so that he could see all the exhibits currently housed in London and he loves it . . . to the extent that the front cover has already fallen off due to excessive reading. No Kudos Cool Parenting Points loss for us.
Personally, I think the main reason he’s so cool about it is because the Earl’s Court show sports two of the spooky Father Christmas’ from the Christmas Specials and they completely and utterly SCARE THE SHIT OUT OF HIM. That’s right - not the daleks, not the cybermen, not the woman who steals people’s faces or the teachers who turn into flying bat-things. He will watch just about anything other than extras dressed up in cheap Santa Claus costumes and plastic masks.
Anyway, I know Michael’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but I thought he rocked. He did some solo stuff I knew, some solo stuff I didn’t, and then some awesome Wham! (WTF? there’s no official website?!) stuff that everyone knew and went mental for. I’m a little young to remember Wham! properly - I was five or six when they split up, I think - but I do love the complete campness and danceability of stuff like Freedom (good video!) and I’m Your Man. I don’t normally notice stuff like video displays and light shows, but even that was incredible - so while I fidgeted through the slow stuff that I don’t like, the stage still looked pretty and it was more than adequately balanced by his patented hip shake and fake police uniforms. Yay!
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8th August, 2008 (1:34 pm)
The Day With Dead Space (8)
So. Dead Space.
When this opportunity first came about, I posted over at SHHF, asking for questions, suggestions, ideas etc. on what to ask when I got there. The response I got to my plea? ‘Varied’ barely covers it. EA isn’t typically a studio survival horror fans have much time for, so scraping past the barely-contained hostility (”What the hell is EA doing, touching survival horror?” “Why the fuck are they interested in SHHF anyway?”) I did discover a reluctant interest in the new title. As a collective the Silent Hill Community can be a humourless, hyper-sensitive and hyper-critical bunch who often slate the games they love never mind the ones they loathe (no offense, guys - I love you and I’m one of you, but you know it’s true), but it was clear that many fans have been following the development of the game from when it first hit our consciousness. And whilst others had only possessed a mild interest to date, they were prepared to hear more nonetheless. Enter Vixx.
I had two things in the front of my mind when I accepted the invitation to head off to the EA studio in Redwood City, CA: 1) it’s going to suck if I’m the only female there and 2) I’m not going to say it’s good if it turns out to be crap, even if they are flying me out. I can’t be bought cheaply (well, I can, but not when it comes to gaming) and if I’m going to say that it rocks, it’s really going to have to rock - completely, utterly and equivocally. This meant that I spent much of the flight over in a blind, sweaty panic, wondering how the hell I could phrase OMG THIS GAME SUCKS DONKEY BALLS politely enough not to sever my newly-formed links with EA forever.
I needn’t have worried. Dead Space rocked. (And I was one of two females in the thirty-two strong crowd. Awesome.)
It was hard to know what to expect initially. DS had been touted to me as a Silent-Hill-Meets-Event-Horizon extravaganza, and while that sounded cool enough . . . well, I think I’m the only person on the planet who was bored stupid of Event Horizon. You know I’m a horror girl - I’m all about the jumps and the bumps and the gore. Sc-Fi’s okay but it’s never been my genre of choice, so it was hard for me to imagine being as scared shitless running through a shiny, clean futuristic environment as I am stomping through a dark, abandoned hospital or creepy-ass school. Silent Hill works because it twists every day normality, so how can a game set 500 years in the future possibly engage me in the same way?
It does. It does because whilst the environment is new, what you’re fighting isn’t (check this amazing trailer to find out more). Much like the enemies of SH2, the fact that you’re fighting creatures that, despite their deformities, are of human origin is a truly horrific twist - and there’s something so sad, so pitiful about that. I was drenched in dismay right up until I had my torso sliced in half by one of the necromorphs - funnily enough, I’m now no longer so humanitarian about it all. :p I tell you though, it has been some time since I died THAT MUCH and THAT OFTEN in a game. The enemies are bloody FAST and it doesn’t take much before you’re nothing but a pile of chopped meat.
A full write up, including details of my interview with the development team (they’re all big fans of Silent Hill, and are clean and open about the fact that if they want to make the most frightening game to date, they know that it’s Silent Hill they need to top) and my gameplay experience will be posted on SHHF shortly - along with the TRULY nerdy stuff that I tried to suppress here - but suffice to say, it was badass. The lack of HUD didn’t bother me - survival horror is all about being immersed into the gameplay anyways - but the fact you can’t pause the action when you’re in your inventory or map (i.e. no respite from getting your ass kicked) is pure revolution, as is the holographic ammo display when you arm a gun (essential: ammo is SCARCE) and your protagonist, Issac Clark’s, life metre, which runs up his spine. There are no cut scenes or movies - that’s right, all the screenshots you’ve seen to date are in-game - so NOTHING takes you out of the game and the player retains control of the character for 99% of the time. Strategic dismemberment means that you not only need to shoot sparingly but also accurately, and learn as much as you can about the enemies in order to dispatch them quickly and effectively. There’s no point holding the gun up and firing randomly; if you don’t shoot smartly, taking out limbs and tentacles strategically, you’re going to do nothing but to piss off some of these bad boys . . . and you really don’t want that.
My final tip? Stamp on every motherfucking body you see, alien or not. Trust nothing and no-one, as anyone of them could be infected and bite you on the ass the moment you turn your back. Literally.
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