the background noise

Surprising really how little Rockstar Games reinvented the wheel with Max Payne 3 's gameplay. To its credit or otherwise its all pretty much intact from the earlier games in the series. Me I loved it, but I can see why some might take issue with it given that it's been nigh on nine years since the last one. Altogether the formula is untouched. You shoot and you dive, dodging bullets in slow motion and returning your own. Then you shoot shoot and shoot again. 

Back when books came on paper and words came in ink, we had things. Things, physical things we could fondle with our minds. Books, CD's, cassettes, videotapes and DVD's. In short, things . If you could smack your own face with it, chances were you could read it, watch it, listen to it or play it. Allegedly such things are rapidly falling out of fashion, these material objects. Yes ownership is not what it used to be, but whilst it has always come with a list of terms and conditions a half-mile long at least having some solid copy of something right there in your hands helped to distract you from the waking coma that was your life.

Walking through a mausoleum of tat (or shopping centre) the other day I recoiled in horror as I came face to face with a life-sized, life-like cardboard cut-out of a standard issue Hollywood celebrity. You know the type, it looks almost human, with a face and everything. I'd say it almost looked like the real thing but it seemed far more authentic, more true to life than any so-called human seen on-screen. You see them all the time, in their blockbusters and their rom-coms, but they never look so full of life as when you see them in two dimensions or less.

'He looks across the room at her. An 8bit face on a 2bit body. Like himself, she is a collection of blocks of colour masquerading as something else entirely. Pinks and reds assemble into a dress, indeterminate skin tones approximate a face. Theirs is a world of easy money and mushroom-shaped people, of wayward turtles and fire flowers, of piranha plants and the pipes they call home. She is a princess, he is a plumber, this is their story...'

Future generations will inquire. Was it really a cartoon inspired by action figures or vice versa? Could it really have been a film series inspired by cartoons inspired by action figures in some grotesque alchemy of thought? Trembling, will the inhabitants of this future look into their neon-lined magnifying glasses, look into the mind-numbing morass of early twenty-first century culture and will they wonder what came first? The lunchbox? The t-shirt? The video game? The complimentary tie-in dinner set? Will they look into this culture and will it look back into them?

Now I'm hardly the first name in all that is popular, rather somewhere past the last name in all things that matter en-masse you will find me. Nevertheless with this disclaimer offered to you my gentle reader I shall now serve up a random opinion for your frontal lobe to chew on. This would be the ill-informed, vaguely asserted, poorly articulated opinion that Radiohead have a lot to answer for.

Better late than this. Flying starts? Hate them. If this blog could be conceived of as a train of thought then it derailed somewhere between fuck and fuck all. Inappropriate metaphor there, the train. It implies forward motion, a ceaseless drive for perpetual progress at the behest of a cerebral surge towards wisdom, reason and shit. But this? Less a train more a train crash of thought really, a car wreck of ideas, a bungalow of deceit, a tenuous metaphor of metaphors etcetera etcetera. So I failed to press play in my brain more often these past few months, my bad. Various events conspired to mercifully keep me from your screen but staying entirely, dubiously, suspiciously yet convincingly on-topic I'll stick to what I know best...