WillWybrow.com

Some professions just look like a really good time to me. They don’t necessarily have to be the most prestigious or well-paying jobs, nor do they have to last forever. But these are a few things I would love to at least try, and why.

Train Driver

This one might sound weird, but I love travelling on the train. Not only would I have the perks of being the one who announces stuff on the train, but I’d get the added bonuses of: free (or discounted) rail travel so I could go all over the country; a really good working knowledge of rail lines, so I can seem really useful when people are casually wondering about train times and distances and prices all around the country; and, if I’m feeling vindictive, the chance to utterly nuke people who haven’t got the right tickets, like I saw one woman doing once. I don’t remember her name, but she looked like my old Biology teacher who loved nuking kids who didn’t do their homework, to the fullest extent she could, so I will call her Zoe. I’ve been on two of her trains (I remember what she looks like), and on one of them, there was this Chinese guy in my coach who had bought a ticket using a Railcard discount, but only had some vague paperwork in place of an actual Railcard; it might have been the application form, but he was really far away. Anyway, the outcome of it was that he was absolutely buggered, and had to pay over £40 to get the proper ticket. Boom!

Astronaut

I never really “had” this when I was a child. That is, I never really wanted to go into space like it is stereotypical of children to want to do. But recently, the idea has been appealing to me more and more. It’s ever since I started obtaining all the Futurama episodes and wrote that Biomars article. So I am a late bloomer, maybe they all are? Space is getting more attractive these days. Maybe it’s subconsciously metaphorical for escaping?

Film Editor

All that slicing and splicing of film into itself… it’s only going to get more digital in the future, and digital is what I do best. Imagine how good the computers are that those guys have… With all that raw digital footage in really high definition, they must be some machines. That would make me happy on a day-to-day basis. Also, I’d get to see films in the making.

I love films. I would love to be involved in the filmmaking process. I think it might be a bit farfetched to set my eyes on the director’s chair. I have the visions for films sometimes, but I’m not sure they’d be sustainable enough to make me a good director, who has to manage the whole feel of the film, made up of all the bits, throughout the filming. But if you shoot it, I can put it together, I guarantee it.

Plus, holy fuck, I bet these guys get to hang around on set on all the best films. They get to see all the bits that might not make it in and get to see bits of movie before everyone else does. And I’d bet they get invited to the premieres. With all the stars. And when you go and see the film at the cinema with your mates, you can look at it and think, “yeah, I put that together.”

These are some of my thoughts for stuff I would like to do one day. It’s a nice and varied list. In an ideal world, I’d get to do all of them at some point. That would be great!

I went to Leicester this weekend. I had a very good time with some very good people. There are a few things to note.

I spent most of my time in a place called Kirby Muxloe. The focal point of this little village is undoubtedly its half-finished castle. A castle that remained half-finished, despite being rebuilt. The restoration work for the castle didn’t include extending and finishing it…

I also got to wander around Leicester City Centre, in a limited radius from the train station, and I was driven around it briefly, yet for long enough to see that Leicester is massive. But even more important than that is that this nice wonderful city managed to make me second-guess my preliminary evaluation of the attractiveness gradient of the country.

When I went to Scotland, it was the final piece of evidence I needed to form a basic trendline between London and the northern border of England. This trendline showed that, approximately, the average attractiveness of girls decreased the further north one travelled.

Well, that didn’t work out so well, since Leicester is further north than Coventry and Birmingham, but there was a really good proportion of reasonable-looking girls. So, my trendline probably isn’t vertical up the map. I will keep you posted when I work it all out, though. Maybe one summer I will be able to tour some of the country’s more prominent towns and cities and take more scientific readings.

Most importantly, however, was the fact that there was no god whatsoever in our weekend. We had no rain during the hours we were outside with the barbecue or walking the dogs (and planning to storm the castle). We had an amazing night with cheap wine and card games, peppered throughout with good-natured jokes about those who couldn’t be there. Come morning, there was an almighty fried breakfast created (I would go as far as to say it was the biggest breakfast ever) and everyone had an excellent, incident-free time.

Rock the fuck on!!

It’s very historical and fun and tourist-attracting, but it’s difficult to take the monarchy seriously anymore.

The Queen is purely a figurehead anyway. Things are decided by Parliament; I’m sure we all know that. There really is no point in having a Queen, other than it makes printing and minting money that much easier, since you never have to make a decision about what’s on the back of the coin.

The trouble is, we’ve come entirely too far to do anything about changing it. It would require nothing short of a flat-out revolution to change these things, and as far as I know, people are too frightened, lazy and contented to revolt these days.

If times were bad, everyone would love a revolution. But currently, the situation is that people are perfectly happy with the way things are. Everyone has their little complaints, but by far not enough to do anything about them (other than complain). Things are “ok” how they are, and that seems to be all that most of us need.

Of course, one revolutionary isn’t going to make a huge difference. We need lots and lots of people to kick things off, and I suspect that such a thing won’t happen in the Western world, ever. If nuclear war were pending then it might galvanise people into action. But nothing short of the threat of impending apocalypse is going to work.

Technocracy

But what if it did? Wouldn’t that be great? The space-race, nuclear war, chemical war, electronic war (Die Hard 4.0 style) or some other modern cause for panic that’s faster than global warming starts, and everybody goes crazy. What will happen? Well, if we’re lucky, people will turn to the scientists to protect them. If the populace gets desperate enough, they might turn to something they don’t understand to salvage their world. Presently, we are more than happy to elect leaders based on their persuasive words, not their persuasive qualifications. Tony Blair studied jurisprudence at Oxford. The theory and philosophy of law. What I want is a prime minister who studied physics or maths. Maybe the world would turn to men of science in its time of desperation.

With more and more parts of our lives being influenced by technological advances, why are we not searching for officials who excel in scientific fields? Get the right people and they can run the world like a well-oiled machine, not the festering ball of corruption and politics and war and religion that it is now. When we get to the fucking moon, do you think the astronauts are going to let just anyone come and live in their perfect new paradise? Fuck no! They’re going to let the war-mongers and the politicians and the bureaucrats and the kings and queens and the presidents all kill each other on Earth (or, as it will be referred to then, the Doomsphere) with their nukes and greenhouse effect while the Moonians (or maybe lunar-tics?) will instate a High Technocrat, a man of (computer) science and logic, to be the head of the state.

I vote: me.

The days of advertising your product are long gone. Recently, unless you can offer up-to-date comparisons of your product with your competitors’ product, you don’t stand a chance.

And then, of course, there are those who don’t actually have a product on the market, but specialise in the comparisons. The trouble is, there are so many comparison websites out there, which one should you use? They all have their advantages and disadvantages. So how do we know the comparison site we’re using is the right one?

If you can’t see where I’m going with this, you are a very generous reader to slow your brain whilst reading and receive the full force of my point.

Why doesn’t somebody just launch a comparison website comparison website? You know, comparethecomparisonmarket dot com or comparisonsupermarket.com?

If now, you’re thinking “well, why stop there? Won’t we then need comparisons of the comparison websites of the comparison websites?” then you are absolutely right. There’s no end to the potential distance we could get from companies selling actual products and services. It’s fashionable to not sell anything at all. At best it could be called the sale of convenience, but I refuse to believe that comparison websites are as accurate as checking all the insurance companies “by hand” and getting the prices and features yourself. And sacrificing accuracy for convenience is just bad practice. Television advertisements cost a fortune and you only really see well-known brand names and corporations purchasing advertising time, particularly in prime-time evening viewing. So that means these comparison websites are making enough to be able to firstly afford the adverts, and secondly to justify roping in more people (meaning that, somehow, these bastards are making money out of nothing).

Just checking a few of the websites I know off the top of my head, comparethemarket.com and moneysupermarket.com had adverts. Not very obvious or intrusive ones, nor were there many on each page. Gocompare.com did not have any adverts, neither did Tescocompare.com, and uSwitch.com’s didn’t come out until a few pages into their site. So that’s not where they get their revenue from. Then, of course, it twigged.

uSwitch.com has agreed deals with some suppliers across all our services to receive a small commission payment when a customer chooses to switch or apply for a product through us.

uSwitch.com

Each insurer pays us an introductory fee per sale. We don’t charge you in any way - not even a penny, and unlike some other price comparison sites, we do not charge insurers to advertise on our site, they only pay us when a sale has been made.

GoCompare.com

And there we have it. It’s plain, old-fashioned salespeople commission. Only salespeople have been replaced by faceless websites, because you can’t doubt a website. You can doubt a salesperson, and each salesperson has a given persuasive power. They’re not certain. They’re flawed. But a website? That can be an engine, something incorruptable.

But it’s all lies anyway, so fuck it.

I think it’s about fucking time someone put a fucking biodome or something up on Mars. I mean, I know it’s freezing up there and everything, but come on, you lose nothing by blasting a few thousand potted plants covered in bacteria or fungus or a bunch of amoebae up there just to see what happens. Get a big old bunch of solar panels and rig them up to some heaters, I don’t know, you’re NASA for fuck’s sake, you’re supposed to come up with these awesome ideas.

All we have are pictures of Mars. Well, observing is all well and good, but if I know humanity, we’re much more inclined to poke our fucking noses into stuff and interfere than we are to sit back quietly and watch. Or, fucking hell, even on the moon. People can walk on the moon, it gets plenty of sunlight and face time with mother Earth, just make a massive plastic dish and attach the bastard to the face of that bland rock. DO IT!!

I can’t wait to see this film. I loved Max Payne 2. When I bought it for the Playstation 2 a long time ago, it stuck as one of my favourite games for a long time. When the game Enter the Matrix was released, I lamented that it wasn’t more like Max Payne 2.

Since those glorious days, it has taken a distant back seat, gathering dust on our shelves until its time to shine again. Well, here it is. The Max Payne movie should be plenty of fun; a dark lead character, a hot female assassin and loads of guns. Not to mention bucketloads of action and bullet-time like, apparently, we’ve never seen before:

They haven’t just ripped off The Matrix, they waited until the technology has been available to do it properly. We’ve been shooting at 1000 frames per second. And I’m not on any wires, either! All the jumping and firing and flipping and landing on my head… That’s all real! We shot it all on film, man!
 
We weren’t doing motion capture then sitting around waiting for some studio to deliver the special-effects shots. It’s for real.

Mark Wahlberg, as quoted on Filmonic.com.

Hopefully they will keep it pretty faithful to the game; the cinematics and graphic novel-style cutscenes really brought out the dark feeling of the game. It might turn out as some sort of Sin City-Matrix-Bourne Trilogy hybrid. But with Mona Sax. Anyway, yeah, things are looking good for faithfulness to the game, taking a look at the set in the shot above, it’s looking like it was copied straight out of one of the games.

I am looking forward to this movie a lot, and to get into the ’spirit’ of it, I have downloaded Max Payne and Max Payne 2 for the PC, and I’m playing them again. So far, I’ve finished the first (and am now replaying the second, with things making slightly more sense this time around). The second game is so much easier than the first, which is a little disappointing, but they are still good fun, if only for old times’ sake.

With any luck, Rockstar will capitalise on the film by releasing a new game. For the Playstation 3. With really nice graphics. Yeah, that would be awesome.

Decent animation is one of those things we take for granted these days, so when a film comes along and expects to survive looking like one of those awful ancient TV shows from a time before computers, it’s kind of like a visual kick in the nuts.

If you ever watched the animated Lord of the Rings movie, you’d be as well to start from that sort of quality when you’re picturing this. From there, however, you need to consider what it would be like if it were even worse. It was nearly offset, as well, by some pretty 3D CGI dragons. But I have a strong suspicion that funds were diverted from animation and into casting. Kiefer Sutherland had no place in this film; he should go back to doing big budget Hollywood flicks like Phonebooth and, uh, oh yeah - 24, 24: the Game, 24: the DVD Boardgame and the announced 24 movie.

But I can hope, can’t I? The Lord of the Rings animated flick in 1978 was eventually made into a live-action film in 2001; I’ll only have to wait 23 years! Mind you, by then, Christian Bale will be too old to pull off a convincing Raistlin Majere. Although, with his white hair and thin look, maybe that’s a good thing?

The film, Dragons of Autumn Twilight, to give it its full title, is an adaptation of the first book of the Dragonlance Chronicles trilogy. Story-wise, it’s pretty faithful to the book, right down to some of the dialogue. There are a few things that have been changed; firstly, the Green Gemstone Man is gone. There is no hint of the three-way triangle of distrust between the elf Gilthanas, the man Eben (who was missing completely) and the mage Raistlin, nor was there the revelation of the eventual betrayer. That could have made some delicious cinematic tension and mystery. We also didn’t see anything of the Chain Room or the tumbling blocks across the gates of Pax Tharkas. Fizban was also done pretty badly; he wasn’t bumbling enough and his secret was revealed at the end (when it should have been revealed in two sequels’ time).

This should have been a live acton thing, and it should have been done well. I can’t believe that Lord of the Rings got so much money poured into it, and this was done on the cheap. I much prefer this story; the characters are much deeper, the world and environment is cooler and there’s way more magic. I will write the screenplay if they want. And do the casting. I will get someone who isn’t Peter Jackson to direct. Does anyone want to make a big old bunch of cash? All I need is a few million pounds to invest in making this film.

Ok, right, back to reviewing the film. Uh, it’s not great. In fact, I wouldn’t bother with it at all. As a standalone film, it’s not worth trying to get into, because it will be more effort than a film should be. For those of you who have read the book and don’t mind being enraged at the patheticness of this attempt to turn it into a film, check it out. But don’t get your hopes up.

At least the filmmakers had the shame and decency to keep it out of cinemas.

Holy crap, they made one. Animated. Jack Bauer is Raistlin Majere.

That’s all I can comment on just now. Review to follow when I’ve watched the bastard. I’ve heard bad things.

But come on, the screenplay was written by the writer of Xena: Warrior Princess! And it has Raistlin!

And I just checked, Lucy Lawless plays Goldmoon. Woah, that’s definitely wrong, though I love Lucy Lawless.

Anyways, yeah, more later. Much love.

Cruelty to pirates must stop. Call now to donate just £2 a month, or whatever you can spare. Your donations will go towards buying the nice people at thepiratebay.org a big “thank you” greeting card, or maybe some letter bombs to the RIAA.

As I sit here, my sister and one of her infinitely stupid friends (and I mean it to the fullest degree, as in, just now used the phrase “it’s funny ’cause it’s true!” in earnest) have stopped watching a Lee Evans stand-up routine on TV, only to swap it for a Lee Evans stand-up routine on DVD.

But I guess making a whole post about how I find Lee Evans annoying isn’t going to appeal to those of you who disagree, so I’ll move on to the actual point of the post, which hopefully you can agree would be a fun idea in theory, even if you don’t like who I’m going to do it to.

One day, when I have a stupid amount of money to burn, I will find a performer who I dislike. There will undoubtedly be some gatherings, if the performer is sufficiently well-known, of people who also dislike him. An “I bet I can find a million people who hate Lee Evans” Facebook group (with only three hundred members) or similar. Then I will buy a bucketload of tickets to his performance; not enough to sell out, but enough to make up a significant proportion of the audience. Then I will make people who hate him come. When only a third of the audience laughs at the first few cracks, they’ll feel embarassed that they’re in the minority, and laughs will die down to nothing (manipulating crowd mentality, which is a big flaw in human behaviour). Then my two-thirds will boo on command, and we’ll shame the performer from the stage. Good work.

In an ideal situation, we’d do it on consecutive days of a tour. Just to remind irritating pricks like Lee Evans that not everybody thinks that dicking about on stage like a seven-year-old is good entertainment.