http://iwantarevenge.blogspot.com/

Goodbye LiveJournal, you trusty friend. You have listened to my bullshit when all others would not. I'm still not convinced, however, that this was good for me.

I have decided, after much reflection on the subject, to terminate my LiveJournal. It is not so much a blog as a bottomless pit for whining and negative rambling. The only reason I post such appalling drivel on here is that I can trust my very small handful of active LJ friends to not call me out on acting like a douchebag. Recently, though, I've been increasingly of the opinion that this doesn't do me or anybody any good: after a stream of contemptably whiny entries this year, I think it's clear that I need to reclaiming blogging as a more neutral hobby. It has become something I only do when I am having a bad day: therefore my entire blogging output seems to consist of pathetic snivelling. LiveJournal no longer represents either the person that I am or the person I strive to be, and I have so few friends on here as to make it almost totally pointless.

It isn't totally pointless, I should add. LiveJournal is the primary means by which I stay in touch with one or two friends (especially now that Eric has imposed Facebook celibacy upon himself - hopefully temporarily?) I regret, though, that I would be ashamed to show this blog to the vast majority of my real-life friends, and that seems to me to be rather telling. Therefore I have decided to move the entire endeavor to (probably) Blogspot and start afresh, whereby all you good friends from LiveJournal are welcome to rejoin me as I try to remember how to blog like a normal person again.

To any friends who will be unable to join me at my new blog - I hope that you don't take this personally. I am leaving LiveJournal because it is too much of an invitation to write like an emo child, and because the slate needs wiping clean, not because of anything to do with my friend circle.

I will be back sometime soon to post the URL for my new blog, and that will be my very last LiveJournal post. A moment of silence may be held in its honour.

And not just because I'm in it. :p

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=B3HfKGuV_EM

It's nice to do a bit of stunt work for someone's else's film. :D

The Way of the Silly Retard has finally been committed to video!

I'm so happy right now.

It's been a long time since I wrote about videogames, but I've actually been playing rather a lot of them lately, and surprisingly enough, almost all of them are "not old".

I hate Guitar Hero but I surprised myself by not loathing Rock Band along with it, despite the fact that it is basically the same thing but with more plastic instruments. I think it may be partly that to play Rock Band with friends you can actually all play simultaneously and concentrate on your own performances, whereas Guitar Hero makes you take it in turns. It's therefore rather beginner-unfriendly, being the newcomer to a room full of GH experts who are all watching you miss notes and play like a spaz. With Rock Band, though, it takes a lot of the pressure off, and band members can independently set their own difficulty levels so they can pick things up at their own pace. Ironically, though, I prefer the GH guitar controller over RB's Stratocaster rival - it looks crappier I will readily attest, but the buttons are easier to locate and press without looking. I still can't escape the same feeling I had playing Donkey Konga all those years ago, though, the "why am I pretending to play bongo drums with a £60 set of plastic pretend bongos when I can buy some actual real bongos for like £20 at the hippy junk shop" feeling. Here, it was the realisation that I was with a room full of people, all of whom could play real instruments - there was actually a real drum kit, three actual guitars, and a very flashy Yamaha keyboard in the room which we could easily have played on and jammed for real as a real band, but instead were huddled around a TV bashing buttons on plastic toy instruments. It was hard to escape the feeling that there was something profoundly stupid going on.

Last night I played the demo for Full Auto on the 360. I'd heard it was alright, and it got a 7 at IGN, so we downloaded it and tried. Our first impression was that it was basically Burnout but with guns. This was closely followed by our second impression, which was that the game was, shall we say, slightly riddled by bugs. We found this odd, because it's not something we had heard mentioned in reviews, but when I say it had bugs I don't mean we clipped slightly through a wall. I mean that 30 seconds into the first race the sound cut out, then one minute later we somehow ended up in an area with no exits (with large green arrows instructing us to drive through walls). In desperation we mowed down a fence and then found ourselves in a strange place with buildings floating in the sky. Then, the car disappeared. Now, I know that these are minor concerns, but still, I do like my videogames to be at least stable before awarding them a 7. Once again, IGN needs a punch in the face (along with Sega for releasing the damn game).

Assassin's Creed is niiiiiiice. It looks nice, it sounds nice, and it's got freerunning in. It's a joy to control and explore, although you can't help wishing the levels were slightly more interactive, although that's probably because we've been spoiled by GTA IV. In GTA, if you ask "I wonder if I can do this?" you probably can. In Assassin's Creed you probably cannot. But it's still immensely fun, and my only major complaint would be that there's too many damned cutscenes! You're itching to run off and explore, but every time you round a corner, at least at first, the game cuts you off and bores you with another ten-minute spiel about something. It does eventually let you play the damn thing though.

I finally played Kameo recently, and I wasn't really impressed with it to be honest. Much like Perfect Dark Zero (which I thought was actually awful) it looked and sounded amazing, but didn't seem to have much going on gameplay-wise. Kameo herself isn't really an appealing protagonist for the game and the tasks required of you quickly turn out to be either fiddly to control or boring or both. I don't know, I couldn't really get into it. But as with PDZ the music is amazing so I think I'll just stick with the soundtrack CD and not bother with the actual game. Viva Pinata has been the only recent Rare game that I've truly enjoyed; I hope BK3 restores my faith.

I've played loads more, like SBB Brawl (my thoughts on which I've penned elsewhere), Dead Rising, Ghost Squad, Crackdown and the Penny Arcade game, but I'm bored writing.

Lately I've been thinking about my friends and considering myself very lucky. Not only are you all awesome and always a pleasure to be around, making my life interesting and fun, but so many of you are creative, too. I love being surrounded by creative people, and that's a large part of the reason that I feel lucky and privileged - because large numbers of the people who have inspired me over the years aren't just celebrities and public figures, but most of them I have people I know rather well, or have met in person, or are ollld friends.

I like creative people. I think creative people can change the world, and I am fortunate to personally know so many of you. I think that many, if not all of you, are destined for great things to come. You are the famous artists, musicians, filmmakers, photographers and writers of tomorrow. I just like being around people who have 'a thing that they do' and do well. I like having friends who will respond to a project idea with "yeah, let's do that!" instead of "maybe some other time."

Let's face it, few occupations or hobbies amount to anything in the grand scheme of things. You may enjoy fishing but nobody is going to care about that after you've gone. You may be the CEO of the world's biggest paperclip suppliers but in 50 years is it going to matter? Art and music and literature are timeless, though. Genius is genius and it never gets old. People still listen to The Beatles, and Beethoven. They still read Shakespeare and Chaucer. They still admire Van Gogh and Michelangelo. And while I wouldn't dream of suggesting that anything about myself or my circle of friends is anywhere near the level of those sublime masters of their respective areas, the point is there. If you want to make a difference, if you want to inspire, if you want to change something, you've got to get creative. Even if it's just designing food packets; these things can become cultural icons, like the Heinz logos.

And you - we - are the ones who are going to do it. When I think about my circle of friends it's like imagining a tree growing - you all start from a relatively small circle, but as you mature independently and grow your own branches, I have a feeling your leaves will reach all over the world.

I don't think that it is an exaggeration to say that many of my favourite inspirational figures are people that I know. A lot of you do things that haven't quite been done the way you do them and you do them so well that it makes my imagination fizz. So it's with a perfectly straight face that I list the names of my friends and accquaintances alongside well-known figures when listing my favourite artists, bands and movie stars.

I often want to shout to as many people as possible about the latest thing I've discovered that my friends are doing, because I believe them to be truly brilliant and it's a crying shame that so many of you are still unknown. I might even start a new blog or website devoted entirely to finding and promoting small-time nobody creatives who deserve to be heard about.

I don't really know what it is that I do, creatively, but with friends like these I'm sure I'll figure it out.

Yesterday my friend told me the message in her fortune cookie. It said "20% of zero is better than nothing."

So, my quest is to launch a solid and stable long-term career in the world of web design, and in order to do that I'm going to need to be rather better at it than I currently am. But no worries, for where lesser men would balk and crawl off to resign themselves to a dead-end job flipping burgers, I'm already hitting the books. First on my list was to learn proper, standards-compliant, validating HTML, and not the garbled mess of tags I normally vomit out into Notepad. mikelaraman.com is now entirely standards-compliant and bears the W3C logo at the bottom of every page as a badge of pride. All my layouts from this day forth will be built to this standard.

My second, and current, task is to learn CSS layouts. No more HTML table-based layouts for me, that's n00bville. Any professional web designer would be horrified to look at most of my source code, even though it looks alright on the front end. If I'm going pro, I've got to tidy that shit up.

All I keep hearing on the subject of CSS layouts is that they are what is known in the trade as A Total Bitch to implement, so I've hitherto avoided sticking my head into what was likely to be nothing but a bucket of headaches and confusion. Having been ploughing steadily through a book on the subject so thick you could smash a window with it, though, trying stuff out and making tons of notes, I'm surprised to note that so far, most of what I've learned has been not only comprehensible, but fucking useful - proper ways to do things for which I've long had clumsy and regrettable work-arounds. Accordingly, my progress through the aforementioned textbook has been one of increasing interest rather than dread, and everything makes perfect sense. Whether that means I'm still on the baby stuff, or I'm just a web design prodigy, I'm not entirely sure.

But anyway, next up after CSS is the one I'm really scared of: ActionScript. Still, everyone and their brother wants web designers to do Flash these days, so I'm just gonna have to jump in. I have another inordinately weighty tome lined up for me to slam my face into, and it claims that it can teach me the goods in 24 hours. If what I've seen of ActionScript so far is anything to go by, I think that might be an optimistic claim, but I'll certainly roll my sleeves up and get stuck in.

Give me a couple of months to systematically teach myself everything I need to know and I'll be good to go. I looked on some local job-hunting websites; there's tons of web design work going around here. The nice thing about web design is there's absolutely nothing stopping you just teaching yourself, getting some freelance experience and then just getting into the industry on the strength of that; it's not like medicine, say, where you have to have a degree or they won't let you practice (for admittedly excellent reasons). Although I do happen to have a design degree now, which I'm sure will come in useful for something, and if push comes to shove I can legitimately claim that I was tutored in Photoshop, Flash and Dreamweaver at college (if not for very long, or in any depth).

My only concern, really, is efficiently tiding myself over until I can start the ball rolling. My efforts to land a regular-joe-job haven't come to anything yet, but I'll keep trying.

So, here's some of the newest websites I've finished:

ruthferrier.com - a portfolio site for an Illustration friend of mine. She did the design, I just did the code.
drawnmucca.com - The promo site for our Illustration student exhibition in London next month.
mikelaraman.com - My online web design portfolio that also has some other bits on it, music and such. I'll put more on it soon.

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/ninja_parade_slips_through_town :D

I love The Onion. <3

I have a college assignment to do for tomorrow morning which involves producing a piece of editorial illustration inspired by an article from the Daily Mirror. I'm currently still skimming through the newspaper, but I've had to pop on here for a moment to express the fact that I find the idea of people actually reading and absorbing this bollocks genuinely unsettling. Of course, all newspapers tell you what to think; but some at least make a non-insulting effort to disguise this fact. Not so, it would seem, if your entire readership consists of congenital thickies (and of course unfortunate art students).

( What fun. )

In a fit of boredom, I just made a list of all the martial arts movie DVDs I own. Apparently, I only have 48 films.

( Cutted for borings. )

I'm going to start tagging my LJ entires. Seems that that's what all the cool kids are doing these days.

Right, I think I've wasted enough of everybody's time.

There seems to be an emerging trend on Facebook for people I haven't seen in years to add me and then not say anything to me at all.

I'm bloody hungry. Where the hell's a sandwich?

Does you a lot of good to spend a very long time being very very silly, I reckon.

Almost certainly add more to that as time rolls by. It's good fun. =D

Bugger.