Happy Lemon

…until 4am doing some programming tutorials for uni, then waking up at 8am and doing a Software Engineering essay for uni gives me a warm tingly feeling.

I know i’m sad.

1. I really, really need to see Office Space. Sounds hilarious.
2. Stanley Ellin’s Dreadful Summit (Penguin release) has the best cover art ever.
3. All the boys are getting hard down the fuck tonight.

Amount of work I planned to do this week > Amount of work I actually did.

:(

Just brought my first web domain/hosting package :D

If anyone’s interested, it’s http://www.badcoder.co.uk but I doubt there will be much on there for a while.

Or, if your super nosey… http://pdp.badcoder.co.uk currently stores a portfolio site I have to make for uni.

Exciting!

I miss Steve Scott.

This is slightly to recuperate from my sweary-time blog last night. It’s also a partial response to this Screened.com article: 2011 will feature more sequels than any other year

If you didn’t know, i’m a great fan of video games. I find the medium to be hugely engrossing, and if the game is creative enough can remain in a mind’s memory forever. I’m sure lots of people can remember the first time they jumped on an enemies head in Mario, or gobbled their first pac-dots as Pac-Man, or in more recent times, entered the world of Rapture in Bioshock.

Video games is a media that has a huge focus on sequels. If a game proves successful, it’s an relatively easy and cheap way to produce another game which the public will like. The years of work that went in to the original Assassin’s Creed compared to it’s sequels is a great reference point for this. Don’t get me wrong, the whole Assassin’s Creed franchise is wonderfully crafted in both visual and narrative sense.

However this is all well and great, and often helps refine previous games, it stunts creativity in that genre. The developers that spend years working on a same franchise often churn out very similar looking materials year-after-year, and although profitable, can’t be essentially rewarding for either the developers or the public.

As the Screened article I linked to shows, the movie industry is facing this same dilemma. Sure, a few of these sequels are based on decades-old franchises, such as the Muppets, or Scream, a lot of these are sequels from very recent movies. Lets be honest… no one wants to sit through another Piranha 3D or Transformers again. Don’t even get me started on the Transformers 3 storyline… it’s one of those things which sounds so stupid, it sounds hilariously good.

Generally: I don’t like sequels, but I see why they exist. But with those figures in the Screen post, it’s kind-of worrying for both the movie and video game industry. Original intellectual property, please!

I want to be a web designer. I’m very critical of poor web design (which is about 95% of the internet). Weirdly, although I hate tumblr, their design is brilliant, usability is great, and it even looks fantastic… bonus!

But, I want to be a web application designer.

I’ve been trying to design a portfolio website now for two weeks, and can’t get a design that i’m happy with. I’ve constantly created and tried new, different designs with completely different CSS styles, incorporating HTML5 and aiming to make shit look nice. Yet to me, it always looks weird. Just something about it is always weird.

I think i’m too critical of my own designs. I’ve often been told i’m very self-critical, which i’ve never seen as a problem before. However now that this might be my future career, i’m kind of fucked.

So I thought fuck it, i’ll do it as a word document instead. It’s easier, less time consuming, and means I don’t have to pay for web hosting and a domain. Student monies is tight! And recently i’ve become a huge fan of the intricacies of document formatting.

But hey, maybe its the lack of sleep talking (it’s 4:30am, been up since 6am). I also apologise for this techie-type (and slightly sweary) post. Night tumblettes!

What do you call people who use tumblr? Tumblettes sounds shit. Discuss!

Note: I might be too self-critical. I’ve already edited this post 4 times, within 5 minutes of posting it to swap a few synonyms and improve grammar.

I still hate tumblr, the people who use it and the content they regurgitate between patrons on an hourly basis. And, yes, I am one of those. And, yes, I hate myself for using tumblr. It’s just (as already said) i’m lazy, it’s easy and it has a wonderful design.

I’m currently sitting in waiting for a delivery from New Look. Ordered for a Saturday delivery, yet they didn’t even attempt to deliver it on Saturday. Instead, I’m sat waiting for a package that hopefully will come soon, or no one will be in to collect it. Anyway, enough melodrama.

I met a couple of friends last night that I haven’t seen properly in ages. They still seemed like they haven’t changed at all, and I don’t suppose I’ve changed too much. Maybe a bit less depressed as I once was, but I do have a wonderful girlfriend to thank for that. Some of them still seemed a bit weird and creepy, but hey ho, it takes all sorts to make the world go round.

University is still a world of hate. Not particually enjoying my course, the work is very dull, very boring and the people aren’t that great. I can’t say i’ve made any true friends there so far, the lecturers seem like the first time they heard of anything they teach us is when they read the lecture slides themselves and they fucking love Powerpoint. I’m going to say it… I fucking hate Powerpoint. It’s a piece of shit that so called “important people” use incorrectly to bore lesser types with inane amounts of text and fuck-all content wise. Presentations are a useful tool, filling Powerpoint presentations which this useless crap isn’t. Sort it out!

Oh, thanks to university, I think i’ve found my future career! I’d love to be a web application designer. You know, like the “top men” over at the amazing Whiskey Media, or the people who make tumblr look pretty and keep the “Tumblebeasts” at bay. I love the Tumblebeasts. It makes tumblr being down a joy. And not just because I don’t have to look at another shit picture or animation that I have no interest in, it isn’t inspirational, and it definately isn’t “cool”.

So, now that’s over with it’s time to say bye for another few months until I get bored and decide to write one of these again. Actually, I might write another post soon about why I hate Powerpoint in detail. Anyways, enough of scribing my thought process and get on with your life!

“I now return you to your regularly scheduled program.”