House

I think, from my experience, there are three different things that happen with Netflix. The first is just aimlessly scrolling through, maybe when you have some unexpected free time or company and you aren't sure what to do until you decide on something you've already seen to avoid disappointment. Secondly, much similarly to the first, is deciding there is a film you want to watch and looking it up on Netflix - inevitably leading to leading to joy when it is or disappointment when it isn't - but it is on another on demand service which you don't have. Or the third, which I think most people experience - binge watching a box set. I think the culture today is not so much to watch TV when it is actually on but to record it, on demand it or buy it when it is on DVD. It's lovely to just keep watching and know there is more, but you do end up a gap to fill when it is finished.

At the moment I am watching House which was on TV pretty much when I was at secondary school between 2004 and 2012. The reason I actually started watching House more recently was because of work experience. In Year 10 I worked at A-Z Maps for two weeks. There I got to make my own map of my local area, and explore the building to see how all the maps were put together. The main office was in the village where I live which was lucky, because I was interested in geography systems and I could walk. Win win really. A lot of the work was ICT based, which at the time I was not used to, and unfortunately I started getting bad migraines in the afternoon which lead to the doctors, which lead to only working half days in the second week.. This is also how I found out that I am terrible at taking tablets - they just make me gag. So when I was working half days, I would come home in the afternoon and close the curtains and sit in the dark with the TV on for background noise. I always remembered House from this, and when I saw it on Netflix thought - hey I remember that. I'm hooked, close to the end of the sixth season with two left. I started watching this on my own, but I started sneaking in the odd episode onto the TV and no we're both watching it.

I was trying to find the map that I made as they printed it out for me but I couldn't find it but I do ironically have another scroll of paper, which was a gift from a colleague. Where I work, I have had a couple of different nicknames but the one that seems to have stuck is penguin. So here is me as a penguin - it's pretty awesome.

I think the penguin idea came from wearing a three piece suit.. Which I still do to this day, not everyday but.. Pocket watch n'all.

Creativity

Something I have always admired about small games companies, or individuals is how creative they are. Big games like Final Fantasy literally have hundreds of people working on them over their life time and they tend to just focus on one thing. There's a team to develop the story, one for character creation, one for the environment. Smaller companies and individuals, do most if not all of it. Of course, on a comparison of scale, the games are vastly different but not less enjoyable than one another. One of my favourite games is The Binding of Isaac which encompasses you traversing randomly generated floors collecting different things making the game pretty much unique every time you play it. Whereas a game like Dead Space for example, you play it once and you know the story, you can play it different ways but you are prepared for whats ahead - still doesn't make it less scary though.

Why do I admire that? I've always wanted to see something out there in the world with my name on it, whether that be a book or game, something I can be proud to say - "I did that." I think my problem is a mix between creative block, and being too ambitious. I have on occasion created an idea in my head and pieced it together and wrote ideas down.. But when it comes to doing it, I find it hard to flesh out. To make this idea for a story have believable character relationships and logical development, to make the characters I have designed move on a screen. Honestly, it's my fault. I have a habit of thinking too big and when I can't see a logical path to get to the end result, it puts me off. I find my break through moments are when I can shrug off this aura of following logic and things making sense, and I just do something. Add something random. Change something you think doesn't need changing. I'll come back to it with my logical hat and see connections I didn't before.

Source: http://www.cfau-pd.net/wallpapers/creative-pictures.html

I've always liked how creativity is expressed with a light bulb. The concept of an idea, coming to light. I think people will often look at this as the idea suddenly appearing in your mind. I like to think of it as.. A switch, illuminating a thought that was already there.

Hello Keyboard

This, surprisingly, comes to you live from my bed after 128 days. I think about my blog from time to time, browsing through posts and looking at old pictures. I've always said that this blog was for looking back at things I've done, things I've experienced. I would love it to go further of course, have my own little corner of the internet where people come to read my things - in this day and age, success on the internet is not uncommon. At the same time you only ever really see and hear about the successful few that get catapulted into the spotlight. I'm hopefully going to come back to my blog though, I say hopefully because I said the same thing to myself 128 days ago.

Its literally been months since I last posted, it makes this post easy and hard to write. I have months of experience to pull on but only one post to say what I want to. Today at least.

So the nerd in me is of course shouting 'Pokemon Go came out since you last posted' which is completely true. It did. And I have been enjoying it, it encourages me to go out and has made for some good times like wondering around lakes in the middle of the night. Sounds safer when I don't write that down. When it first came out, it was interesting to walk around towns and see people with their phones at arms length, crowding around stops and gyms and playing.. What I have noticed now, is that it has gone back to the phone being held at the waist but people are still playing - and talking. On multiple occasions, people have approached me and the people I am with to tell me there is a Pikachu over there or a Slowpoke done the road. It's an interesting development in society that a video game was the thing that got people outside talking. And inflating the sales of portable batteries by something like 200%.. Everyone's a winner?

Guess what's back on the telebox. Bake Off! I am watching todays episode on iPlayer right now, so I am very distracted. They're marking Viennese Whirls which I love, and I imagine would taste better than I am used to if they were made at home rather than bought from a shop - but I can't bake. I like Selasi, he has a very laid back approach and is using some interesting flavours. I mean he put a scotch bonnet in biscuits - I wouldn't to feed that to Paul Hollywood.

So, take a moment to look at this.. It's something that Amy showed me and is absolutely ridiculous..
http://news.sky.com/story/syria-tourist-board-reveals-promo-clip-with-slogan-always-beautiful-10559682
Syria, for whatever reason, decided that now would be a good time to release a video to try and attract tourists to go and visit. Don't get me wrong, the images which they used in the video do make the country look attractive - until you remember that it is very much an active war zone. I get it, I do. Everything in the media at the moment is negative, when it comes to Syria, they might be trying to repair their image. I understand but there is probably a better time to do this.. Maybe I am just being a negative Nelly.

I talk about films a lot. Funnily enough I have been to the cinema three days in a row from Sunday to yesterday.. Sunday I saw Bad Moms, Monday was Sausage Party and yesterday War Dogs. Go Cineworld cards. My thoughts.. Here you go.

Bad Moms was an interesting film, and on the surface does come across as a comedy - which it is. I think it was quite clever how they worked in a commentary on motherhood of recent years and how they are expected to be these crazy machines that do everything. It does stereotype men as being useless and not really contributing to family life but I may be reading into it a bit much, in the sense it was just emphasising on the journey of the characters becoming strong and more independent. It had its laugh out loud moments, it had its heart warming moments.. Its a film we agreed that we enjoyed but probably wouldn't buy.

Sausage Party.. Well. What do I say? We know who made it, we know who's in it.. The trailer let us know there would be copious amounts of swearing and ridiculous ideas.. But it literally gave nothing away that happens in the film. At the moment, I am describing it as an experience like Human Centipede - not for the content, but as a film to say.. Yeah I've seen that.. And then you back away slowly.. I'll warn you now, it goes to a very dark and weird place in the last half an hour..

War Dogs was really good, the film itself was about two hours long and felt longer. I remember checking my Fitbit (I have a fitbit now by the way..) at about 9:30 thinking.. There's still an hour of this left and I am glad there is. It explores the true story of a firm that sells weapons to the government and how it goes.. Slightly wrong it is safe to say. The casting was really good, and the story itself whilst dramatised was believable. Dedication from Jonah Hill for putting weight on after loosing a lot to play the part - with an interesting laugh which I am interested to know where it came from.. I would definitely recommend this film out of the three - if you were presented with this choice.. Yeah.

I'll leave it there for now. As you can tell this is a bit of a mish mash of thoughts tumbling out of my fingers onto the page and it has been a while.. I guess I am out of practice structuring something that makes a bit more sense and follows a trend. Blog you later - haven't typed that in a while for sure..

Friend Request

So we went to the cinema yesterday, we being me, Amy and Tom to see a horror film called Friend Request. Tom enjoys a horror, as do I whereas Amy is quite happy to cover her eyes and ears and pretend that it isn't happening. Both approaches work pretty well. Here's a link to the IMDB page if you'd like to read up and look at the actors/actresses in the film.

Friend Request - IMDB

I always find with horrors you get a niche pool who tend not to appear in any other genres. For example, the main character (Alycia Debnam-Carey) in this, the only other thing I recognise her from is Fear The Walking Dead - and by that I mean I watched one episode and forgot to carry on because it's awesome. Whilst I have no problem with this, it does throw me off a little bit. For example, whenever I see Patrick Wilson in a trailer now I think they're making another Insidious film, I honestly thought they were but it turned out to be the trailer for The Conjuring 2. The only other thing I know him from is Watchman but I like to think the owl get up separates him in that from confusion.

Courtesy of Wikipedia

So what did I think of Friend Request? For me, I think I'd give it a seven out of ten. Let me explain why - so naturally there may be some spoilers from here on in.

Is He Meant To Be There?

First things first, managed to get the video uploaded to YouTube, it only took 88 minutes opposed to the crazy 11,800 it previously stated.. I would recommended using the little YouTube icon to watch it in a better size should you so choose.

So, today was remembrance day, and I assumed that it would be a pretty much widespread thing that everyone would observe the two minutes silence. I was quite shocked with the statistic on the news came on to say that 40% of people wouldn't according to a poll. I found that quite surprising but I guess we live in such a busy time that some people won't stop, not out of disrespect but because they can't or are told not to.

The parades on Sunday were wonderful, a great show of respect. It was interesting to see all the different regiments and parts of the army that you don't always hear about. Yet what did the media focus on, the fact that a political leader didn't put down the wreath correctly. And then that he stuck around at the end to watch the rest of the service. Who cares that he did, there were literally thousands of other people there - and the day was about remembering all those that were lost to get us to where we are today. Why wasn't the news focusing on the turn out, on the veterans? It just really leads you to believe that the media is corrupt because this would clearly look like publicity for for the dude. I know his name, but I don't want to associate it to my blog. Ha.

I feel like this picture of Gracey could quite easily become a meme. Like.. I found your browser history..

Pumpkin Juice

I'll just get this out of the way now - I didn't watch any Harry Potter but wanted to carry on with the theme hence the title.. I was very much preoccupied by a little something called Fallout 4.. I'll get to that later.

So I feel pretty comfortable saying that myself and Amy really quite enjoy Halloween, all the decorations what not. We didn't do pumpkins, in terms of carving, until a couple of years ago but now I can definitely see it being something we do for the foreseeable future, sitting around the table pulling out the innards of an innocent squash. Doesn't seem to normal when you put it that way eh? Usually we just got to the shops and pick out too normal looking pumpkins and go from there. This year, we did something a bit different with one of my work colleagues, the apparent phenomena that is PYOP.

Pick Your Own Pumpkins. Turns out there is a pumpkin farm in Sandling which I had no idea about, which is in Kent. I saw it was a phenomena because we got there and there were literally floods of people; a much larger crowd than you would expect for picking out a pumpkin, I would quite easily say at least 300 people with a constant stream of traffic coming in and out. We were not fortunate enough to get a wheelbarrow, and thought we wouldn't need one which lead to this ultimately..

Chocolate Frogs

Just writing some blog whilst watching the second Harry Potter film, as you do, as you do.

Today I wanted to go back to Amy's birthday, where we had a little trip to London. Amy had said to me that she wanted to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory so I thought - lets go then. I really enjoy musicals, and West end productions, this was no exception. The only thing I don't like, which I can only assume that a number of other people wouldn't either, is the pricing. I know you can see from all the seats other than the ones with the pillars, the prices are pretty steep. The stalls are over £100 each! We were sitting on the balcony, which is the top level. When we saw Wicked, we were on the Grand Circle which is one floor down.

Now, the balcony was pretty crazy. It had it's own entrances on the side of the theatre, and you go up six flights of stairs which really knackers your legs. The thing that threw us off was how steep the balcony was, to me it seemed like if you took a stumble, you would fly off of the edge. It made Amy a little uneasy at first but as soon as the play was on, no problems. They used the whole stage and a lot of the performance was actually off of the stage, above it so you can always see what was going on. The only bits we couldn't see where when they were right at the front of the stage, close to the seats where you are 90% likely to get spat on.

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