Final Update

I’ve noticed that a few people seem to be discovering this site lately, and I figured that some people might see this and think that it’s going to be continually updated.

It’s not. Sorry.

After a long time of not managing to keep up with Absent Conclusion, I decided it was best to just start all over. I’m now posting regular articles over at my new project, Overthinker Y, so check that out!

Update

A very quick update on what’s up in the world:

Yesterday, I hit 10,000 words of my National Novel Writing Month attempt, so I’m pretty happy about that! I’m also still actually feeling pretty good about keeping it up, so things are looking good.

And, because I would feel remiss if I didn’t at least mention it, Wednesday saw The Apprentice lose ‘I’m the best at pitching’ Natalie, whose first televised pitch came off like some amateur had stuck the audio file into Audacity and made overzealous use of the ‘insert pause’ function.

Have a wonderful life!

I’ll be back, and hopefully when I am I’ll have a novel to show for it.

Getting Ruthless

Get it?

This week’s edition of The Apprentice saw surprising success on both sides, or so it appears at first. It’s possibly the first week that honestly felt like it could have gone either way right up until the results were revealed; both sides made errors, sure, but both sides did (or were carefully edited so as to appear as if they did) fairly well when unleashed into the London Pet Show.

Frankly adorable project manager David – don’t ask me which team he was the manager of, one’s Connexus and one’s Versatile but I doubt I’ll ever know which is which when they keep changing who’s on them so frequently – brought a possible new high of enthusiasm to this week’s proceedings, practically gushing over the animal-related products available for his team to sell. It was also something of an interesting experience seeing the Apprentices interact with people who’ve already attained the kind of success they want, although I suspect the fact that they were face-to-face with actual start-up product designers and business managers was probably lost on them amidst the squee-eliciting things with rabbit’s faces on. I wasn’t particularly sold on the T-shirts, and as it turned out neither was anyone else, but you can’t fault the childlike glee of Team David as they strutted about their weirdly bricky interview room clutching animal balloons. Was it strategy? Was it just genuine joy at getting to have animal balloons? I lean towards the latter, but the point has to be that it worked.

Meanwhile, Team Scott – we’ll get to Scott later, but he might well be rising up to the top of my favourites list – got straight to business; too much so, if anything. Brett, well known for his adherence to specifications, took charge of the balloon pitch. It was obvious from the get-go that Team Scott would never win the custom of the balloon vendor, not when Team David spent apparently the entire time getting hands-on with every product that came their way, but Scott cleverly passed their eventual decision as ‘we’ll target cats’.

Then there were the actual sales. Selina was the standout here, I think, in that she stood out of the way while everyone else got on with it. Scott combined charm and legitimate business aptitude to make more sales than anyone else on his team (the numbers will never be revealed, but I suspect that made him the highest-grossing candidate of the week), while Ruth’s charm offensive made potential customers get slightly defensive. You really can’t fault Ruth’s enthusiasm, as even Executioner Claude admitted, but you would think there would come a point that she would realise her stream-of-consciousness sales pitches were turning off punters like James Joyce turns off people who aren’t really into reading.

Ultimately, it made sense for Ruth to go. It’s a shame, because I was really rather starting to like her, but I’m the kind of person who finds it genuinely hard sometimes to watch people embarrassing themselves. And that’s what Ruth was becoming. I do want to know where she gets her suits, though.

To be honest, if I was in Alan’s position (did anyone else hear one of the candidates accidentally call him Alan at one point?) I would probably have let Selina go purely on the grounds that I would NOT BE ABLE TO STAND WORKING WITH HER. GOD. Her not giving a toss was a slight improvement on her hounding Charlene every other moment, perhaps, but Selina has to be holding the position of my least favourite right now.

Meanwhile, Scott. Scott, everybody. He must be the first PM ever to bring two people back into the boardroom and have nothing but positive things to say about how hard they’d tried, for which I absolutely love him. He’ll probably be fired next week. It says something about a candidate when the worst thing Lord S can think to say is that they’re ‘not ruthless’ enough; I suppose ruthlessness is a legitimately important quality in a businessperson sometimes, but it did sort of feel as if there was an inability on the judging panel’s part to say anything genuinely negative about Scott as a person or a project manager. I love Scott. He’s my new Solomon, and if his business plan is sixteen pages of boats I will cry into my cheap noodles.

Tune in again next week for… something. I am appalling at remembering what’s in the next time previews. Pretty sure it looked horribly cringey, though, so I for one can’t wait.

Doing A Novel

November is fast approaching, and with it NaNoWriMo. I’m having slightly mixed feelings about it, which I wasn’t expecting. I guess it’s hard to sustain the process of thinking about writing over a long period of time when you know you can’t actually start writing until a certain day – and actually, I’m finding it kind of hard to imagine actually starting to write. I’ve had this story developing in my head for a while now, and more actively since I decided to make it my NaNo project, but I think perhaps there are mixed feelings of excitement and that ever-annoying self-doubt starting to creep in.

I’m hella excited. I don’t know how long it’s been since I was excited in this way; it’s a different sort of anticipation than most others. I can get excited for upcoming events, that sort of thing, but it feels different to be excited about creating something, especially when I haven’t tried to for so long. I’m excited to see what I can do, but more to see what actually ends up written down; I’m eager to get that feeling of having accomplished something for myself and to finally be able to read this story that I want to tell and put into words.

I’m also kind of scared. Well, not scared. Scared isn’t quite the right word. It’s something like a nagging concern that I’m not gonna be able to do it, that it’ll get to the end of the day on November 1 and I won’t actually have written anything down yet. That first day is for sure the most worrying to me; I feel like if I can start writing, I’ll have done the hardest part. That’s not to say that there won’t be other hard parts coming up, for sure: I know the end of the story so well at this point that I’m thinking the easiest part will be the last few days (assuming I can actually finish it in that time, since I’m starting to think it might take more than the standard NaNo 50k words), but the middle is still something of a grey area to me. Apparently this is a fairly common problem: writers find it easy to come up with a beginning and from there an end – or even come up with an end first and work backwards from there – but it’s rare to have the middle worked out before actually starting to write. Supposedly it just sort of comes once you’ve got the beginning down, but we’ll see.

I think I’m still more excited than nervous. Whatever happens, at least I’ll have tried – and, much as I hate to admit it, I don’t know if I’m self-motivated enough to be able to write without the added push of taking part in NaNo. If I’ve managed to complete it by the end of November, even if the story isn’t finished yet, I’m hoping I’ll feel more able to write off my own steam in future.

It’s a fun time. Hopefully. I’m definitely looking forward to it, anyway!

Also, thanks are definitely due to Hannah, who’s been making sure that I actually stick to blogging for once and has been so proud of me for trying NaNo that I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have been able to do it if she hadn’t been. If I do manage to come up with a decent story, it’ll be thanks to her. So cheers. I love you.

Stay tuned, and with any luck I’ll be reporting writing success before too long!

Jenny, We Hardly Knew Ye Either

Welcome back to what I’m now considering my weekly Apprentice recap, since I’ve now done two. This week’s episode saw the unfortunate demise of Jenny, who I’ll admit to not having realised existed for the entirety of episode one, in what I can only describe as a mostly-boat-related loss.

This week also saw the return of cheeky thriftiness, courtesy of that guy whose name I can’t remember for the life of me, but he looks a bit like Hugo Weaving except with a face that manages to be simultaneously rounder and more oblong. This lovable quality of all good entrepreneurs, particularly those from the London area, made a notable appearance in the last series when Solomon (bless his heart forever) attempted to pass off a paper skeleton as ‘anatomically accurate’. To be fair to him, it actually was, and much cheaper than the opposing team’s full scientific skeleton to boot. If I’d been in HRH Sugar’s position, I’d probably have rewarded such ingenuity. Emperor Sugar did not take as favourably to it, suffice to say.

Anyway, this season’s first real display of loophole abuse came courtesy of Hugo-adjace, who interpreted the specifications’ (I’m surprised Brett didn’t get involved) request for a certain size of inflatable boat to mean that a toy one would suffice. He was right, to be fair, with his purchase coming in at a handy £245 under the hapless girls’ legit boat.

What we learned this week is that the girls don’t seem to work well together. I don’t want to think that there’s something about the female condition in general that causes what is perhaps best termed ‘cattiness’ when attempting to haggle en masse, but I think there’s something about this particular set of people that just makes it really hard for them to see eye to eye on… anything. It’s likely more to do with the entrepreneurial disposition than the feminine, although it’s almost difficult for me to even continue referring to the contestants of The Apprentice as entrepreneurs or business people. What they are, more than anything else, is reality stars.

It comes down to a general trend in television and its viewership, really. Jenny, while she lasted, was largely unnoticed – I was actually surprised when Vana elected to bring her into the boardroom for her inactivity, as there were certainly people who would have better served the team had they decided to contribute less. In fact, I was sort of coming around to Jenny. She was probably the most normal-looking (by which I mean least excessively expressive) and most well-adjusted-seeming of the girls’ team, if not the contestants outright. She seemed like a real person rather than a dialed-up caricature of what BBC producers deem one of the seven or eight representatives of the ‘entrepreneurial type’. (There’s the slow one, the hard seller, the one who takes all the credit, the difficult one, and so on. It’s sort of like how I assume the characters on The Only Way Is Essex must be, having never seen it: pick a type of person, whether it be businessman or socialite, then derive a few key characteristics and base everyone in your case on one of those taken to its absolute extreme.)

Admittedly, that image of Jenny was somewhat lessened by her bizarre outpouring once she was revealed as the unlucky firee of the week. I was reminded of a previous candidate who, once released, had sort of slowly edged out of the door as if pulled by an invisible force of ineptitude while constantly pleading not to be fired. Jenny was slightly more accepting of her fate, if not that it meant she was any less likely to succeed in the world. Still, I guess you have to be at least slightly egomaniacal to consider appearing on a show that essentially now amounts to selling yourself.

Speaking of which, I have to comment on The X Factor. I’ve not watched it this year, because having tried to get into it in the past I’ve learned that the people I think are ‘good singers’ are not the people who tend to do well, and that’s nothing if not frustrating. But I have been aware of the ‘six chair challenge’, a needlessly cruel addition to the already overly dragged-out audition stages in which each candidate performs, is told whether they have one of the six places in the next (and I would hope, but not assume, final) stage before the live shows, and then might well end up losing that place if somebody after them does better.

That’s already a bit messed up, but it’s the role of the audience that’s really ground my goat when I’ve caught snippets of the show. They seem to have got into a kind of routine: chant ‘Seat! Seat! Seat!’ for every half-decent singer that takes to the stage; enthusiastically call for the beheading dismissal of one of the people they previously demanded be given a seat (in a really uncomfortably personal display of hatred); rain hailstones made of weirdly self-righteous anger on the judge when they acquiesce and let one of their six go. Then there’s the optional final stage, in which they demand ‘Bring them back!’ and quite often have their demands met. Simon freaking Cowell, ostensibly head honcho of the whole damn thing, was brought to bear by an angry audience; they yelled and screamed that they wanted someone called Joe back until King Cowell finally called producers over. Then someone presumably had to go and find one of the candidates he’d fired (sorry, still in Apprentice mode) about four auditionees ago, before Cowell restored him to a place.

Naturally, someone else had to lose their seat in the process, for which the audience booed lustily.

It’s a dangerous game, reality TV. Particularly when you start to give the audience real power. Show them that they can change the course of the game and they will do all they can to make it happen. I don’t even think they cared about Joe’s singing all that much; it’s a power play, more than anything else. If they can get someone brought back, they will, because then they’re relevant and powerful and they have a say in what goes on.

Thank God The Apprentice isn’t filmed in front of a live studio audience,

My NaNoWriMo

This November, as it is every November, is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for a while, but never got around to for various reasons, mostly uni.

I hadn’t heard of NNWM until I started university, and by the time I’d found out enough about it to know that I wanted to do it, it was already past time to start writing. The next couple of years, I either told myself I had too much uni work on or I thought I just wouldn’t have time with trying to maintain commitments to studying and a long-distance relationship.

Anyway, now both of those things are over. (Only the long-distance part, though.) So I really don’t have any more excuses not to write, and this is my promise to myself that I am in fact going to write a novel over November. No excuses, no back-out, no being dumb and going ‘ugh, nah’ for whatever reason. I’ve been meaning to be the sort of person who writes a novel… pretty much my whole life, and now I’m 21 it’s at the point where I’m either going to be the pathetic guy who wanted to write novels, or the pathetic guy who wrote a novel. I know which I’d rather be.

Anyway, this is the first time in years that I’ve had an idea I’m excited enough about that I’ll be legitimately disappointed if it doesn’t get written. It sounds kind of hackneyed to say that I feel motivated to write the story for its own sake and not for mine (‘you’re letting the LITERATURE down!’) but it’s kind of true. The only ideas I’ve cared about enough to actually put into words have been other people’s; a friend in high school had a fantasy trilogy concept that (while we now both accept was terrible) was exciting enough to me that I managed to write the first book of it, a 100,000 word piece of what I at the time thought was pretty good writing. Then there was I Am The Chosen One, the play I co-authored with a friend last year. He then directed it, and it actually did fairly well (in terms of audience reaction, at least. It was a uni society play, not Broadway), but the point is that it wasn’t really my idea. I guess I felt more comfortable contributing to someone else’s creativity than I ever have indulging a concept that’s entirely my own; I didn’t really own it. I was just the guy who came in and brainstormed, then helped out with the actual ‘writing’ part and whatnot. It was fun, but I think it’s time I finally made a story of my own.

I’ve been meaning to do it forever, after all.

Anyway, the fact is that I probably should have done NNWM long before now. Tons of people go into November without so much as a thread of plot; they just start writing, and by the end of the month they have 50,000 words that they’d never even begun to conceive of before they actually started putting words to a page. It’s lame, but I suppose I never really believed in myself enough.

I’m not sure I even do now. Maybe I’m just mature enough at this point to realise that it doesn’t really matter whether I believe in myself or not. What matters is that if by the end of November I’ve produced a novel, then I will have done something I’ve always wanted to do – and maybe proved myself wrong along the way.

(I’d like to thank my co-pilot on this one, Hannah, who sat on my butt and waved my arms about for a bit while reading back what I’d written. Thanks, Hannah.)

Dan, We Hardly Knew Ye

The Apprentice is back! And with it, 18 new hopeless ‘entrepreneurs’ vying for a spot at Lord Sugar’s side. I only really got into the show for the first time about two years ago – it was the year with Luisa and Jason, and I can’t really remember anyone else. Hannah and I got very attached to Jason for his lovable face and bumbling ineptitude, which as it turned out became something of a pattern.

Jason was great. He managed to sell a caravan one week and got a personal well-done from the Lord himself, which was as unexpected as it was vindicating for those of us firmly in Camp Jason. The look of terror on his face when he was called back in, followed by the confused delight, was the highlight of that season (alongside his wonderful delivery of the sentence ‘I think it’s to go with the potatoes’, which will live in our hearts forever).

Then, next season, there was Solomon. Solly (as he was apparently known to some) came across as one of the nicest and most genuine people ever to appear on the show, and he was even commended as such by Claude Littner, interviewer and psychological torture enthusiast extraordinaire. That is, until he was ripped apart for having a business plan that was basically just a load of pictures of boats.

Still, Jason and Solomon both managed to get fairly far in their respective series. So I was hopeful when this one started that Dan, a sweet-looking curly-haired fellow with an interesting sales technique (‘Would you be interested in buying a salad?’) would also get further than his generally nice demeanour would suggest.

How wrong I was. Dan was eliminated on the very first episode, which he took in typically rather upbeat fashion. This is the point of the show that suffers somewhat from oversaturation, what with having to get to know 18 people enough to care if they get fired, and episode two had me going in feeling that I didn’t really know who anyone was. Except Brett. He makes things to the specifications.

We’re also getting to know the aforementioned Claude, who takes over this season from Nick Hewer as Lord Sugar’s resident eyebrow-raising watchman. It’s unfortunate that his surname happens to be Littner, because all I can see whenever that gets mentioned is his face on Yoko Littner’s body. It’s not pretty.

So the show chugs along, as it does at this stage, and we’re coming to get to know each person well enough to have some sense of whether they might make a decent businessperson or not. There’s Ruth, the surprisingly astute token older woman with a penchant for wearing what looks like Elmer’s skin made into a suit; Jennifer, who I didn’t even realise was a person until she suddenly piped up in the boardroom at the end of episode two and got a surprising amount of support; Magin (sp?) who sounds a bit like a dopey goat; Joseph, resident obvious dickhead who I’m expecting to turn out to have a heart of gold at some point but who is probably legitimately as misogynistic and dopey as he appears; April (emphasis on the -pril), who becomes far more Jamaican-sounding every time someone mentions she’s from Jamaica, and… everyone else.

So far the gang have sold fish and marketed shampoo, and surprisingly the boys did rather well at the latter. I say surprisingly not because I think men can’t market shampoo but because nobody ever does well on early marketing tasks. There was an interesting billboard featuring a man with foam dripping endlessly into his eyes, which while painful-looking was at least more professional than Ruth enthusiastically shushing her entire audience. So far, I can’t say I particularly want any of them to win. It always ends up coming down to the business idea they submitted before the show even started, which gets completely forgotten about between episodes one and penultimate, so it’s almost impossible to pick a winner until those last stages.

Still, at least we’ve still got Brett. He can be trusted to make fishcakes to the right specifications, even if it means he runs out of ingredients with 200 still to make.

Saint’s Row IV vs Shadow of the Colossus

I think games are great, obviously, and I think that for a lot of different reasons. It’s actually because there are so many different reasons that I’m so confident in my opinion that games are great; if I only had one reason, I wouldn’t be particularly secure in that view at all. Diversity in games is, in my opinion, an awesome thing (I don’t just mean ethnic, sexual, cultural, religious etc. diversity, although obviously that’s a plus too), and that’s why I’ve decided to compare two completely different games. You see, I think it sucks that some people who call themselves ‘gamers’ are bitches to other people who call themselves ‘gamers’ because they don’t think they’re the right sort of ‘gamer’. So to illustrate how stupid it is to think that just because two things are both games and both get reviewed on the same scale they’re actually the same, I’m gonna go ahead and treat Saint’s Row IV and Shadow of the Colossus as if they’re directly comparable.

By the by, I could have done this with any game, from Flappy Bird to League of Legends. It’s just because I’ve played these two recently, but I’m of the opinion above for all games from hardcore to the casualest of the casual.

So without further ado, let’s compare.

Story

Story is always an important part of any game. The past, present and future of your characters and their narratives is what motivates play: the past events drive the characters, the player makes decisions in the present and looks forward to beating a section because the story then progresses. Shadow of the Colossus has a story of sorts, although much of it is open to interpretation, about a boy trying to bring a girl back to life. He does this by killing giant monsters.

Cool.

Saint’s Row IV is about the flippin’ President of the United States, who used to be a gang leader, getting sucked into an alien simulation and fighting their way out with superpowers and awesome hacks.

I think I know which one I’m giving the win to there!

Graphics

SotC was a PS2 game, so it’s kind of low-res compared to the later-gen SR4. Again, can’t really compare.

Weapons

SR4 has, like, a dildo that you can hit people with, and a gun that shoots dubstep music, and about six billion different firearms. It’s awesome. SotC has a sword that reflects light sometimes and a bow that shoots regular non-dubstep arrows, so… pretty dull, amirite.

Gameplay

Well, SotC does have a grip metre, and SR4 doesn’t have one of those. But then, the reason it doesn’t have one of those is because you spend most of your time flying around not needing to grip shit. If The Boss showed up in SotC-land s/he would just fly onto the Colossus’ head and mercilessly rupture its weak spot with a blast of lightning and a well-placed dildo hammer. What would Wander do in Steelport? Ride his horse around in the traffic? God, all those people would have been screwed.

Dick jokes

I don’t even need to go into this one.

Voice acting

SR4 has credits to its name such as Laura Bailey, Nolan North, probably Troy Baker – Hulk Hogan’s in SR3, for heaven’s sake. SotC has some guy called Kenji Nojima. And he barely even talks.

Boss battles

Well, SotC is sort of exclusively boss battles, which you would think would make it a surefire hit to win this category. But then, SR4 has aliens with superpowers. What are the Colossi, anyway? They’re just big maybe-robots-maybe-animals. They can’t even fly helicopters.

The point, I hope, is by now illustrated. I love both of these games, but real talk? Shadow of the Colossus has to rank higher for me, whether we’re talking about which game I personally prefer or which I think has the most artistic merit, or even which I just consider ‘better’, whatever that means. There are infinite ways to judge whether a game’s good or not, but what isn’t cool is judging someone else by the standards they decide to use. Everyone should just play all the games, all the time, and love them all.

I think we’d all be happier for that.

American Horror Story: Hotel – Premiere Review

American Horror Story is, on the whole, an enjoyable and well-made show. It feels a bit disingenuous even to refer to it as a ‘show’ and not as a collection of shows, like some sort of weird mismatched box set of programmes that just happen to share a bunch of actors and a flair for the horrifically camp. Or perhaps the camply horrific.

Anyway, one of the greatest opportunities and challenges of running an anthology series like AHS (again, I’m reluctant to so much as mention a series ‘like’ it, because I can’t really think of any others) is that every season gets a hard reset. Everything’s back to the beginning; we don’t know these characters, their motivations, the settings, or even the rules of the world in which we find ourselves. First episodes, then, are at the same time exciting and slightly disappointing, in that every first episode has to catch our attention enough to keep us watching while also setting up the basic groundwork to underlay everything that has to happen in the season going forward.

Hotel definitely passes on one of those counts, there’s no question about it. The other, I’m not so sure.

The show opens with a pair of Swedish (?) tourists, who make their arrival into the eponymous hotel and find themselves greeted by none other than Kathy Bates. Sorry, I mean Iris. One of the most interesting things about AHS as a whole is the repeated appearances of several actors across seasons, which has a slightly bizarre effect: simultaneously we’re made to feel reassured and welcomed into a familiar world, and thrown off by how jarringly apparent it is that these familiar faces are not who we’ve become used to them being. Anyway, the pair go up to their room, talk in Swedish (?) for a bit, encounter some creepy children and eventually have a zombie-looking fellow burst with aplomb from their mattress. It’s at this point that I start to wonder what Hotel is trying to be, a feeling that goes through peaks and troughs as the episode rolls on.

I’m not going to recap the entire episode, but it’s hard to review it without having to mention several different plot lines. The episode connects the majority of its characters only by location, and we’re left wondering how the many lives we get a glimpse of are going to intertwine. This isn’t necessarily a criticism, as it does evoke intrigue and, as the vast majority of the hour seems carefully designed to do, a general feeling of disorientation and curiosity, but it does make the whole thing feel like more of an anthology than AHS as a whole.

Aside from the aforementioned Swedes (?), we take peeks into the curious activities of Sarah Paulson as some sort of afro’d junkie killer, Kathy Bates and son as receptionist and… son, Dennis O’Hare as a slightly vaguely defined employee who nevertheless seems one of the most interesting characters thus far (O’Hare has a habit of showing up in less than central roles and making every scene he’s in completely about him), and… oh, yeah, Lady Gaga’s in it too.

Gaga’s scenes are possibly the most attention-grabbing of the episode, and probably my least favourite. I don’t have anything against gore and sex, but my God. You know what I’m talking about. I can’t forget what I’m talking about, much as I wish I could. I’ve never been afraid of blood as such, but there’s definitely such a thing as too much blood. Especially when it ends up on kissing lips. It’s during every moment that Lady Gaga’s on the screen that I feel most as I suspect Hotel wants me too: intrigued and terrified. I do miss Jessica Lange, but I will admit Gaga’s a better fit for this particular character. Side note: I’ve never really seen her face, but she either naturally has or is very good at putting on a really fucking terrifying face. Sounds a bit insulting, but it’s a plus in this role.

We also get a few minutes with Wes Bentley as the character I like the most so far, a slightly Will Graham-like detective with family problems and what looks like a real thing for messed-up killers. It’s not the most original of character archetypes (there’s someone with almost the exact same backstory in pretty much every work of fiction to feature police officers, from Dirty Harry to Dexter) but Bentley’s near-trademark set jaw carries it off pretty well. His scenes are also welcome for being the ones with the most actual plot, something the rest of the episode is markedly lacking.

I wish I could leave it here, but I have to talk about that scene. I have a grudging respect for a show that can get someone of Max Greenfield’s mainstream appeal (thanks largely to the excellent New Girl) to appear in a single episode only to get raped and killed – it’s almost reminiscent of Hannibal managing to get Zachary Quinto in basically to play an angry guy followed immediately by a corpse – but I don’t know how I feel about how it was done. Whatever this zombie-dildo-Pan’s-Labyrinth-whacko guy is meant to be, it’s almost definitely too much to have such a long scene of just… humping and screaming. It makes me feel sick and disgusted and really quite legitimately afraid of having to see him again, which I suppose was sort of the point, but there’s an underlying dislike of the scene itself for depicting his acts.

So where do we go from here? I have absolutely no idea. Hotel‘s gone the route of grabbing as much attention as it possibly can with episode one, eschewing any real narrative work in favour of imagery. It’s not necessarily a bad decision, but how it shapes up will absolutely depend in retrospect upon the rest of the season. So far, Hotel feels like a weird sort of mismash of previous seasons: Murder House‘s tendency to gleefully declare ‘EVERYONE’S DEAD AND A GHOST’; Asylum‘s love of putting its characters through the worst things it can possibly think of; Coven‘s… um… colour scheme (Okay, Coven‘s a bit of an outlier.) and Freak Show‘s unified setting, in which every character is first defined by whether they’re part of the titular community or afraid of it.

I have hope for the season, because so far I’ve enjoyed AHS. But after episode one, the only thing I can really say about how I feel is this:

We’ll see.

The Gaming Life of the Working Man

I used to play a lot of video games. By a lot, I mean think hyperbolic. Like how space is really, really big, somewhere in that sort of range of… bignessitude. This is primarily because as a university student studying possibly the most ‘no right answer’ subjects ever, I had what seemed like infinite free time on my hands and two motivations:

One. Kill that time.

Two. Play as many games as possible.

That situation brought up a couple of problems, primarily that it meant I actually got burnt out on gaming pretty quickly. Spending eight hours a day gaming is surprisingly unsustainable sometimes, especially after two solid years of doing pretty much nothing but gaming and bingeing through TV shows. It did mean that I managed to play through quite a few single-player campaigns, but playing the same game for more than four hours tends to bend my brain a bit; by the end of university I was spending a lot of time flipping between games, and filling the gaps with sessions of Civ V that could last… I’m not sure how long they lasted, but suffice to say I had about 50 hours logged in that game around March 2015 and by the end of uni in July I had over 400. It wasn’t a particularly healthy way to live.

Anyway, I don’t regret it. I can’t even say I wouldn’t do it again, because give me that much free time and I will absolutely do it again. In fact, I am much more willing now than I was a couple of months ago, and I shall tell you for why:

I still have motivation number two.

Annoyingly, motivation number one has been sort of flipped on its head by working life. No longer do I need to kill as much time as possible; I now need to spend my time as wisely as possible, getting all that boring life stuff done and whatnot. So when I do have time to myself, the old desire to blast through as many games as possible reignites and I find myself… enjoying it less.

See, the thing now is that when I have a couple of hours to spare, I feel under so much pressure to make the most of them that I end up having a rather stressful time trying to enjoy myself. I end up blasting through games as fast as I can (I’m skipping all the cutscenes in Kingdom Hearts Final Mix+, which not long ago I would have considered the most mortal of Disney-related sins) while simultaneously half-watching as many episodes as possible of whatever TV show I’m currently into on Netflix and even more half-listening to as many episodes as possible of whatever podcast I’m currently into (which I end up doing at about double speed).

It’s basically a much less enjoyable way of doing the things I love than I’d like. It’s the best I can do, really; I just don’t have the time to spend playing through games in a leisurely way any more, or I’ll never complete them – and then I’ll never be able to work through all the games I want to play before more come out. My days of fully filling out Jiminy’s journal on Proud Mode are probably over, sadly. It sort of feels like work, with the deadline being whenever I have something to do next – and knowing you have to be finished puts something of a damper on the fun of it all.

Essentially, if you happen to be a non-working person, I have this to say: enjoy wasting as much time as possible, because I actually wish I’d wasted more time, if anything! (It’s barely even a guilty thought; I legitimately wish I could have spent more time in university doing nothing and playing a ton of video games.) Don’t forget to do the things you actually want to do in life, because I regret not having done a few of those, too.

Just make sure you enjoy doing what you enjoy while you still enjoy it.