the background noise

Incidentally, Happy Birthday to me! Now on with the show... I don't know when it happened exactly. 2015 or 2016 maybe? The exact point of origin is unclear. At some point around this time the rate at which I was playing and completing games was overtaken by the rate of new releases that I simply had to play. Free time was at a premium, the games industry itself was shifting into the live service online-only time sink model we see everywhere now and indie development was producing some soon to be big-names. Between reviews, articles, tweets and streams, the intrigue for established titles and new names swiftly took shape. All channeled through online sales and price-cuts which combined to form a hulking hybrid hell bent on eating up my free time.

A book review why not? Have been reading William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. No particular reason why this and now other than curiosity really. The name casts a large shadow in the sci-fi genre of course. Neuromancer, cyberpunk, skies the colour and texture of white noise, the kind of good stuff that shapes genres and other writers long after its publication. So what is Pattern Recognition? It's bleeding edge human trend detectors. It's the niche within a niche subcultures of the web. It's also copious amounts of interior design lovingly described throughout. Also 9/11. This is an early noughties book and those horrific events loomed large over everything. Truly it has it all! More truly, for me at least it was a sprawling, at times quite interesting but often quite tiresome tale told with variable levels of success.

Could it be? Could it be happening? Could I be wiping the dust off this place? I could be, in fact I am. The relaunch of the former Background Noise begins here, starting with the kind of rebrand I'm told is very fashionable these days. Yes the new name is an awful pun, yes it's sticking around, no I don't really know who I'm talking to just yet. It was, is and remains a work in progress. It's all an attempt to leave what's behind me firmly in the rear view and press forward into a shiny new future of possibility. The stops, starts and intermittent spaces between them are past tense and there they must stay. Tally ho, farewell and goodbye. But also hello!