Can I has Internets?

Every now again I find myself stopping and thinking… what did we do before we had the Internet? How did we find stuff out? Did we even bother to find stuff out, deciding that spending a lifetime of research in some dusty old library wasn’t worth the answer to which kitten is cutest? Now, when someone asks you something you’re not sure about you can generally find an answer within a few minutes – one second for the search, two minutes to an hour to work out which of the 100,000,000 links you got returned are telling you the most trust-worthy information. And now not only is it textual information, but finally visual and audio information are free to be searched, found and shared – as with my last post about Daedelus, where I unfortunately didn’t have a video of his box of lights but within a few seconds I found someone else’s to save me a few hundred words of description. Or maybe even a thousand or so.

All this is not a replacement for human interaction and conversation, but that can be quickly found on the internets as well. Again, one second for the search, two minutes to two days to find someone you trust, then one to two years to get rid of the embarrassing disease (if ever). Out and about in conversation with folk you meet, be it through the web or through more traditional means, how often do you wish you had access to the internet to help your conversation along or prove a point? And now you can, with the iPhone and other Internet enabled mobile devices. Or should you be suffering from a lack of face to face conversation those same devices can allow you to call friends, text people or just play games to distract from the beckoning void of loneliness. Whatever happened to just getting drunk and passing out? Another traditional art lost to the world.. unless it would make a good video for youTube, in which case it will live on forever.

So is the internet a good thing? Enabling us to move rapidly forward with our lives and goals without the endless flustering about trying to find things out. Or is life all about that finding out, so we’ve lost something important that we constantly try and reclaim elsewhere? Perhaps we’ll find it if we search on the web.

Daedelus in Montreal (Igloofest)

Just got back in from a splendid night down in the Old Port of Montreal, watching the ever splendid Daedelus. He played an hour set, half an hour less than scheduled for some reason, but what an hour. The beats ranged from mellow hip hop to near techno, with seamless mixing and live playing from a range of film samples and of his own creation. It even snowed a little which just made it seem all the more magical. Thanks again, Mr D.

As usual Daedelus was creating live tracks on his wonderful box of lights ‘n buttons, which you can buy now should you so desire. Samples are started via the box on the fly and you can watch the lights moving across in time with them as they play. The samples can then be adjusted, repeated, replayed or played as if on a keyboard all from the same box. It’s amazing to watch in action if you get the chance.. oh wait, here’s a live clip from youTube so you can see (not Igloofest!)

Go see him if you get the chance – or check out one of his amazing albums. He’ll be huge soon, and deservedly so.

We Heart Beautiful Katamari (Old Skool)

Since both M and I are addicted to ‘We Heart Katamari’, the genius, bizarre game that involves rolling stuff up into a ball (like food, toys, people, countries and so on) we finally bit the bullet and retro-graded to buy the original – Katamari Damacy. So apologies to anyone who expected to see us this weekend.

The original Katamari outing is, strangely enough, almost identical to its sequel. You have the enigmatic/mentally deranged King of All Cosmos giving quests to his son the Prince to restore all the stars to the sky, after an apparent drunk driving accident caused them all to be knocked down. You have the wonderful techno-jazz sound-a-like songs. You have cows and bears that really p*ss you off. You have confusing instructions that make no sense. And, of course, you have to roll. Where the game differs is, unsurprisingly, in the handling of the Katamari, the round ball you use to roll everything up. The game mechanics obviously haven’t been as smoothed off as they are in the sequel – so you sometimes find yourself frustrated/confused/shouting about a situation where the katamari is stuck for no reason, or loses a pile of collected items from a very very slow collision, or just won’t get out of a corner – plus the game designers hadn’t yet implemented the ability to see through walls when they get in the way so sometimes you can’t see where you are… Of course all of this is due to us being used to the sequel, and once you learn to forget the other mechanics the fun is still all there, and that’s the important thing. Really.

The only bad news in all this is that the latest Katamari game – Beautiful Katamari – is only currently out on XBox 360. Dammit! There is a rumour about a Wii version, but who needs yet another reason to yearn for a Wii? Please send answers written on a Nintendo Wii to the usual address.

Daedelus Decries the Snow’s Demise

The ever wonderful Daedelus is coming to play Montreal on the 25th January, as part of this year’s IglooFest. Plus he has this awesome video out to keep me going till then, splendid.

Maybe I’ll try and give him a CD of all the photos from his gig at APT the other year. He seems to like one of them at least, since it’s currently his mySpace profile pic. Bless {:).

More Gaiman Stuff in the Works

After many years of wishing everyone would hurry up and put Neil Gaiman’s excellent Sandman books out there as a movie, I’ve now decided that it would probably just upset me and most other folks who have their own Sandman vision in their heads. It’s funny how with books you’d expect this concern, but with Sandman being a comic you might think they’d be no issues – but having seen a few comic conversions recently I’ve realised how much editing they’d have to do and the story is the thing. So I’m happy not to hear of any Sandman movie news. Ever.

That said I’m always happy to hear of more Gaiman related movie news when I’m not so emotionally invested in the books. I loved Stardust, I’m much more tempted to go see Beowulf now I’ve found out Gaiman worked on the script and soon we can see Coraline – an adaptation of one of his wonderful children’s books.

What I’d really love to see out of Sandman is a stand-alone movie, penned by Gaiman and using the characters without impacting the main storyline. That would be awesome.

Bill Gates can be Funny Shock

For this year’s CES Bill Gates and some other slightly less famous folks* put together a faux “Bill Gates’ Last Day at Microsoft” video. What’s amazing about this is that Bill Gates actually comes across as pretty funny, and I have to admit that I never thought I’d enjoy a Microsoft video direct from source – but it’s good to be proved wrong. Nice job, Bill!

* Some of those less famous folks; Matthew McConaughey, Bono, Jay Z, Al Gore, Hilary Clinton, George Clooney, Steven Spielberg and Jon Stewart. I guess it’s great to have celeb friends and a few billion dollars spare.

Colbert back on the Air

Even though the writer’s strike is still on the ever awesome Colbert Report, along with other less wonderful daily shows (sorry Sandra), is back on the air. Woo! Of course now that I’m living in Montreal without cable I have no way of knowing how amazing Stephen is being without a script… unless of course there was some kind of way to see him on the internet or something… Nah. That would never happen because that’s why the writer’s are striking… Oh wait.

And that was a standing ovation of over two minutes… only slightly spoilt by the geeky overweight guy saying ‘I love you, Stephen!’ at the end. We get it. We all love him. He knows, we don’t need to tell him. Doi.