Boo hoo, why have about 2000 people only got invites to a beta test of a computer game that lots of people seem to care about, and I’m not part of it, I went to all the shows, paid thousands of pounds travelling round the world to turn up in a hotel dressed as Frodo, only to then be laughed at because my ears weren’t real enough, oh the torment, the horror, this is not why millions dies in countless wars so we are denied to play against people who fry in sunlight, but can move and build huge armies using the power of their minds instead.

Christ. That was a long winded sentence.

The thing is, I actually never traveled anywhere looking like a reject from Lord of the Rings, nor paid lots of money like others in the world, yet somehow, I was one of the lucky first few who got to play the first round of the Starcraft 2 beta, and the overjoyed look on my gleeful face having got home after a long hard day of sleeping, you could have used as a Christmas card.

And what would a post like this be without some pictures just showing the fact that I have it and you don’t, like the snide little small minded ba****d I am:

Well aside from the fact that I’ve been able to log onto something that others haven’t been able to, mainly due to the fact that they care very little and have other things to do, what could I possibly tell you about this beta experience of the sequel to one of the very best real time strategy games ever created?

Well, for a start, not a lot. You see, you are effectively thrown in at the deep end of the multi-player only for this testing, with the single player content, the part where most people’s interests will lie firmly remaining out of sight for the time being. You have to create a primary and secondary name to be seen by people, link that to your battle.net thing and then you start pushing buttons to start losing.

I say losing, as that’s what you’re going to do for the first ten matches in either 1 vs 1 or 2 vs 2 because I felt all cocky having got the chance to play and I lost within 4 minutes of playing the first game, as my opponent at the time chose to “rush.”

When I say “rush”, I don’t mean “rush to the bus stop as it’s just pulled up”, or “rush your homework by colouring in different doodles and hope that gets you a pass for History.”

No, I mean “rush” as in build lots of one type of a unit, normally the first one you get to build that has a gun or something, then go to the other guy’s base and destroy everything before he’s had a chance to put down some lovely carpet and do up the kitchen in the command center.

Games like this are a regular occurance at the moment, with one time the excuse given to me when I asked why he just “rushed” was, “I chose a random race, you have to just win when you select random.” Well, the idea of playing against someone is to win, but surely that just means it’s down to whoever builds the one lot of units first and races to your exact location. Like the strategy there.

The other current method of play is racing up the various technology options and then building one huge armada of the big mother f**king ships and the simply fly in and destroy everything. In nearly 4 minutes.

If this type of thing happens 10 times in a row before you can then placed in the special needs league for each type of game, you can bet your bottom dollar, that people are simply going to leave the multi-player content like the first game, where basically the Koreans using every limb possible took over the universe, (well one of them died on the toilet after taking over the universe) and then taking to the warm comforting safety of the single player and then walk away after it’s all done.

The new units, I’ve not really had the time to get to grips with as you have to try them out when you’re playing against a real person, so nine times out of ten, you don’t know at the present moment, what unit is good for what situation, hopefully they all have guns and they hurt the other evil people more than they can hurt me. There is a mode where you can play against the computer, however this mode is so easy to win here, even I can win here. The only way to get better is to play against others.

And that’s only dependent on how long it is before you throw in the towel and go back to w*nking. At least you win in an empty way, every time.

Yes, instead of focusing on the now, which as I type consists of listening to ambulance sirens bellowing out their ever-increasing wails to non existent traffic outside, let’s have a post dedicated to that year which no-one remembers fondly: 2009, the a**hole of the noughties.

(Note: Must find out what this decade is going to be referenced as by those silly radio shows.) And now for a brief news rundown of the year, complete with sarcastic remarks;

Meanwhile back here at Ooh Sometimes, if any of the content was to go by, very little actually changed over 2009. The number of posts were still down, the lack of anything substantial of note proved to be the deciding issue amongst money struggles, visits to Spain were the most in any one year, setting a new record for….err….something.

The best month for actual fun and frolics was indeed March, though that was more due to the over eagerness to write about 2008, more than then current events such as the discovery of a YouTube video where a turtle get his freak on with a shoe, and wondering why there was so much built-up anger most of the time about, well, anything as it happened.

The further discovery that Sweden can do Vampire Horror while also making us laugh with cats, only made the situation more bizarre to grasp what was actually going on here at all.

While there were some posts about the films of the year, Star Trek being on of the better films of course, Gamer’s Corner all but dried up with content, only coming back in some for towards the end of the year, and there was no sign at all of the Ooh Sometimes Podcast to be heard. Mr Voice Over Man has long since assumed that Europe had been destroyed in some accident involving beans and went to tend to his farm in Texas.

The highlights for sure had to be meeting Mr. Micheal Ironside with Mrs Jewel Staite, with the second best being annoying to the Spanish prostitutes in Madrid, taking photos and running away. The Eurogamer Expo also ranks highly.

And that’s it as silly as all this is, 2009 was actually a bad year for most people, and there was not a lot of fun to be had other than repeating the same routine every day, getting fatter and lazier than ever before and become perhaps far more cynical about everything than a 27 year old ever should.

Therefore, this single crappy (note the header of this post has one less p in it, thus perhaps insinuating that it’s so crappy, it can’t even be spell checked properly) post should be taken as is, 2009 was indeed a year to forget in many ways.

What’s worse, 2010 has not started out any better, with the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Haiti, more terrorism alerts, even more silliness with the MPs because they still want our cash to get into office, more people are inquiring about divorce… the list goes on and it’s only the 25th of January.

Nothing has changed at all then, we are all even doing exactly as we all were before the end of last year. That new year, new start rubbish has indeed proven to be entirely that; rubbish.

Man, I used to be cheerful.

Rather bizarre that the first post of 2010 is a whimper, with an outstretched hand trying to combine key presses to form sentences that entertain as well as inform but instead failing like the Banking system and therefore bringing the world to ruin.

Because my creative brain is still waiting for the engineer to make it’s call-out after being rang two years ago (Damn only paying for 5 Year SLA for a brain repair), thus stopping the usual pants-soiling trash to start the new year, like a list of things that happened that had no real point to it at all, the best thing I can do is say that I’m very tired already, health still terrible in grand scheme of things, and that I will be back the weekend.

That will be all.

So to business in the strange bit between Christmas and New Year, and though this may not come as a shock to many people, it has come as a shock to me, having torn myself away from the digital world for a short time to spend away with the folks eating my way through 17 tonnes of food, metal and puppies while having a drip in my arm for the cider.

British Television is crap.

And not just even a little bit crap, I mean crap to the point where in a thunderstorm, you fall to your knees and shout “WHY?!?!?!” to the accompanying dramatic orchestral overture signifying that hell has landed on Earth and there are no Big Macs left in McDonalds.

Let’s examine what was put on Prime-time shall we? Endless repeats of shows older than I am, all demonstrating that TV was better in the 70s, Harry Hill’s TV Fart, where they look at all the TV that’s on and make fun of it with being that funny (and somehow that in itself, funny enough to have won an award or 12), Ant and Dec’s Boxing Day Disaster, where lots of people we care very little for show up and say something while dribbling, at which point all the animals in the audience cry out for more.

Let’s even remark on the human tragedy that is the All new Mr and Mrs on ITV, with which you are presented with three celebrity couples, all of whom you want to see how long they last with a chainsaw between the eyes. They were all so sickening to see, gushing over each other just to ensure that you know that they have everything wonderful in life and you don’t.

I want to call them all a bunch of hairless f**kers, though perhaps that’s just me being bitter that people with the intelligence of dried prunes are worshipped these days, and therefore nine times of ten it’s not even worth getting out of bed.

Oh, and to satisfy those noisy pr*ts that read trash like Heat magazine, we got to witness the most embarrassing facts like to be that the man watches football and the woman goes shopping, or owns lots of one thing. STOP THE PRESSES…I want to get off. We’ll also leave the X factor annoyances to one side as frankly it pretty much shows itself for what a frightening abomination it is.

The usual accompaniment of Soap Operas also did their best to invade the schedules like the boozy uncle which comes for Christmas and ends up staying till July or he’s burnt one of the kids.

The brief glimpses of both the major contenders on British TV, seemed to share the exact same plots now, perhaps now sharing the same writing team for cost reasons where basically if none of them have wailed and hit each other for 10 seconds, it’s considered a slow episode. Dallas was considered to be of higher educational value than any of this.

In fact, the news that an insane Nigerian was successfully halted from blowing people up by heroic passengers aboard an internal US flight came as a welcome change from finding out that someone had slept with someone else while having several other hundred relationships with various bits of fruit (not all of them human), and just on that subject as a quick aside; let’s see how long it is before the British are blamed for this tw*t by the Americans who should have been paying attention a wee bit more rather than having their 5734th burger of the day.

Back to the TV (much as I don’t actually want to) Channel 4 did its best with repeats of the Peep Show, where only 4 or 5 of the shows are actually worth watching, with huge amounts of Come dine with me, where everyone on the show you soon want all to die from Food Poisoning, thus slowly solving the world crisis on over population.

Finally on Channel 5, Heads or Tails, where contestants literally flip a coin to win Justin Lee Collins, an Ewok from the west country from what little I can tell. And maybe some sludge, who knows what is actually on Channel 5 these days?

Oh and we didn’t even get onto the endless adverts for perfume to make you smell worse than a pub toilet and numerous appeals to sponsor polar bears, pandas, African children, Prince Charles, tins of beans etc.

I could actually carry on the endless list of absolutely awful drivel that graced the screens, which we were forced to switch off the box and enjoy silence instead (none of that conversation nonsense here thank you very much, talking to other people, what will you come up with next?), but alas perhaps we should contemplate boycotting the whole lot?

Quality shows like Spooks, Screenwipe and the odd sitcom from Channel 4 are lost now forever it seems in an endless stream of made up reality shows and third rate celebrity loving train-wreaks so stupefying, I honestly believe people are becoming of lower intelligence as a result, thus all that bleeds into real life and makes the rest of us that don’t actually know about these shows question whether the idea of Natural selection is really just a load of twaddle.

But coming away from scathing remarks now, it appears the multi-channel age has finally come unstuck, where the television executives have too much air space to fill and now are forced to scramble absolutely and I mean this, absolutely anything together on a budget of £3.50 and a packet of crisps to keep us from going off to do something else. Like masturbating. Again.

Perhaps one way of solving this, is now start reducing the number of channels, thus reducing the airtime and thus ensuring that higher standards of programming, to entertain and perhaps on occasion educate have to be met in order to grace our screens given the fact air time will once again be at a premium.

After all it will mean more money will be channeled into few, better programs, rather than spread so thinly over 700 channels with nothing good on, something which given most of the channels are cutting back with at present due to budgets being tight, something else which surely will have influenced this year’s programming.

Maybe in this day and age, less will be more?

Or maybe now is the time to pitch that idea I’ve been saving for a rainy day; have like two pigs in a duffle coat fly to Egypt to fight crime. This time next week it will be on BBC One, just watch, if you can that is.

And so it’s that time of year once more, and that means a festive Ooh Sometimes message to be displayed on the 25th of December to those who are too bored to talk to their families and prefer to hide looking at smut on the internet instead.

First of all, Merry Christmas to everyone today, hope you got what you wanted or indeed perhaps you just got to spend time with your loved ones, and if not, just remember, EBay allows you to sell both your crap presents and your loved ones on as required.

By the time you read this, I’m away from it all once more, back in the Midlands with friends and family, more than likely right now I’m on the floor under the influence of yet more questionable substances, all the time laughing at shiny things. Damn, that cheap Tesco bleach is powerful stuff.

At 7pm or thereabouts we can all neglect each other and watch Doctor Who…Again. Christ, it’s almost like Groundhog day, only once a year. Only this time we get a new Doctor. Well, New Year’s Day we do anyway. More than likely this is just setting it all up, but enough speculation on one of the very few new pieces of programming to grace our screens this year.

Last year, I wrote about little things like the sales already started before christmas, the ongoing terrorism that is the financial market will make sure that no-one spends for some time to come, and more and more people lose their jobs.

I also tried to point out that things could be a lot worse, and really that still stands. 2009 was a hell of a hard year in many respects, and trust me that will be covered in a fabulous all star post soon, complete with hurtful remarks and reasons to see if rope on a dangling light is a work of art, and would it look better with your neck in it.

But for the time being, we’ll all off, we’re all drinking heavily and possibly having naughty with someone you know, or not, we don’t judge here, though if they have a sexy sister with no self-esteem, let me know.

So to finish off this year’s Christmas message, enjoy the moment, and let’s look forward to eating 70 days worth of leftovers.

And now to dangle keys in front of you in the absence of any real christmas gift, allow me to inform you about a new service which may not last very long due to legal reasons, despite the fact they say everything is fine about that; http://www.tvcatchup.com

Most of the freeview channels are now available via this service, with the only adverts from the service (so it remains free I assume) showing up when you change channel, though the picture isn’t clever at times, looking like an old Mega Drive game instead (note you have to have a clue what a Mega Drive is to find that funny.).

The sign-up process is free and it must be noted that you still need a TV license to view this service as it falls under watching content live. So at the very least this is something else when other people hog the box to watch Doctor Who, while you can watch other things while pretending to work on that nuclear reactor for next year’s science fair or something. At least until Sky get the site shut down for providing a service you should pay for.

Now this is going to appear to be something of a bizarre topic to bring up at this time of year, given the fact that those turkeys aren’t going to eat themselves and Grandma needs throwing on the fire, nevertheless, this evening it was something I felt compelled to write about and given the fact after two days in and out of bed exhausted, finally the time has come to put finger to keyboard once more.

Something came up at work (oh yes I’m still employed by a real firm you know, well at the time of writing I was anyway) recently and one event that has been at the back of my mind a fair bit, was the fact that we all had to adhere to a new “Blogging policy” which is a new thing to have to consider really when you’re a happy go lucky chap on the internet writing about how many time you went to the toilet in one day or the questionable smells from your armpits.

There are now for the first time ever, official guidelines I now have to follow, perhaps out of something truly horrible happening like business being lost, or perhaps even people avoiding working for them, for hearing the latest in a long line of spooky stories at the haunted corporate building. Who knows why they materialised, the fact is that they are there.

Then I started wondering more about the whole area of “enforced” censorship as a result of who you work for, and not for the first time either, this subject came up a while ago: How to write a Blog without losing your job… from September 2007 in fact, when a female worker got fired from Nintendo for being thick and I learned about the existence of “Blog Change Agents” working for companies writing to people who write about them negatively to try and change their opinions via one means or another. Maybe it’s time to revisit the subject and see if things have changed and perhaps now find way around the minefield that is blogging freely while under the company rules.

Well even at the arse end of 2009, not a lot has changed in many ways. People still get jolly upset legally when you mention them with their PR people having a look over first and it appears someone did just that recently as we were all warned recently by various managers to not knock the company you work for to other people outside your family as not only does this reflect badly on the company, but also yourself as a person. Though….surely that’s obvious.

I mean not the “badly on you” part, let’s be honest, raise your hand if you’ve moaned about work to anyone outside your family. There we are, we’ve all done it and it’s part of conversations that people have on a daily basis.

But the stupidest thing to do is this: writing down your annoyances on the internet for all to see. Then frankly you’re asking for it and you deserve to get your arse handed to you with a lovely P45 tax sheet to hand in at your first day at Burger World.

As much as we all would love to write a 70,000 word novel on the whole subject of why our workplaces are located in the 7th layer of hell including a couple of chapters bad-mouthing everyone who steals our oxygen, wondering who the hell stupid people advance to positions of authority even though they could be outwitted by a dead badger, while earning 17 times what you do, while you struggle living in a bin etc etc, what purpose would it ultimately serve?

Granted it’s a release of anger, pent-up aggression that one seldom can excise in other ways other than a good hard (woooh there, can’t put that in), in the long run you will only serve to damage your employment chances, which given the fact we are still in a depression, is just as bad as teasing a lion by putting your head in it’s mouth while flicking it’s love spuds with a wet towel. So what good actually does get served from writing about what you do?

The odd exception aside from long and boring technical manuals or equally dull autobiographies which springs to mind was the work created by Belle de Jour, aka Dr Brooke Magnanti, the woman who wrote about her “work” in the Secret Diaries of a Call Girl, which led to the series where Billie Piper made sexy noises a lot and got her breasts out for ITV2.

In a strange sort of way, this writing served to highlight what it was like to work in a certain industry, the highs and tragic lows along with strange situations which can occur even when doing the job on a regular basis, in this case, the naughty industry. It’s the only exception that springs to mind at the moment that had become popular and sold very well as a result. But again this was all still cloaked in an air of mystery as to who it was that was writing such material, only the fact of who wrote it came out this year, way after all the material had been out on the public domain for some time, and her finanical future was assured.

Given the fact that there is the worry about writing the wrong thing these days, here is a link to the EFF that was given to me recently with tips on How to Blog Safely (About Work or Anything Else) and a lot of the tips revolve around being anonymous. That’s it. The key to the whole freedom of speech bit is be anonymous.

It seems to protect you from a lot of things and in a twisted fashion you could end up becoming a blogging superhero, working by day as a binman, but at night, armed with a keyboard, you destroy the festering corruption that is coming from the local council’s bin management policies and put an end to 17 different bins being used for the same thing. Provided you are smart about the whole thing, you could change things for the better or, let’s be honest, get what you really wanted; a column in the Guardian.

It seems to work for a number of miscellaneous writers who appear in the newspapers, commenting on the City’s daft financial practices while buying another boat for themselves as a treat or those stupid twentysomethings just writing about their love lives which are almost always utter failures, oh boo hoo…..To me, they’re all tw*ts.

But really a lot of us will not achieve anything from such writing and therefore in most ways it’s just better to shut the hell up. The UK, though behind America in setting up policies based around what you do outside of work, is fast catching up, and it won’t be long before it’s the new standard that you sign a form stating that you will not talk about anything work related unless authorised to do so.

Should we be actually be concerned that more and more, your workplace can dictate what we can and can’t say on a medium that’s meant to be free from restraint? Well the simple truth is you should be more concerned about the X Factor, the cost of wonderbras or the fact that global warming is occurring as a result of your excessive farting instead. It’s actually less likely to attract the wrong kind of attention and won’t be an issue on your ability to keep that cardboard box over your head at a time where career options are limited.

Unless you’re a hard working prostitute, in which case, I salute you and look forward to reading about all it.

No sooner had I had posted about Christmas, how little things change unless you push it as well as New year being this point where people pretend that things are going to change, a new start if you will than my spies in the underworld in between playing with themselves and throwing pies at the homeless alerted me to point my browser at this foul thought from humanity:

I had no idea it had already started. Sometimes it does make you wonder about the species we’re a member of….

Yes dear friends it is that time of year….again.

As you can see at the moment, it was time to dig out the old images and theme settings for yet another dose of christ-all-mighty-mas cheer, the same old bloody songs being repeated and sold for the same price as last year, almost as if the record companies and radio stations think it’s the first time we’ve all heard Noddy Holder shout “It’s Christmas, it actually is, honest, I’m not kidding this time.” since yesterday.

The thing is, I rather don’t like Christmas. After last year’s beginning of the credit crunch goodness, things haven’t really changed at all.

You still have to worry what to get people, as you look like a complete and utter rag that’s been tossed all over by Hitler if you fail to turn up with anything short of something amazing, like the cure for cancer, or a remote control house. You got me a jumper to keep the cold out….bastard!

You still end up attending office parties which are just as painful as being in the office as the same people are there, only this time armed with drink, all pretending to like each other but deep down all of them secretly wanting to take out a gun and re-enact the columbine school shootings and may be get a better score.

You have put out 20 year old decorations round the house making the place look more like a council estate complete with burned out Ford Orion than at any other time of the year, buy too much drink and food along with stomach pump, all in the effort to get into the spirit of things. Maybe get a big telly to make sure that the time spent with your loved ones is watching Doctor Who instead any amount of human contact.

Remember as well, you give thanks for everything you have, friends, family, a roof over our heads and food to fill our over sized bellies, basically underlining the fact we’re putting off death for a little while longer while others can’t really do so.

More and more adverts come onto the goggle box, telling us to buy 127874 varieties of bloody toilet water that you’re meant to drown yourself in, plan for our death thanks to June Whitfield, and maybe get another £45,000 unsecured personal loan which sounds like a great idea if it wasn’t for the fact that it was that kind of thinking which got us all into dire straits in the first place.

It’s the time of year you get a few days off, eat and drink and p*ss. Magical.

Perhaps I’m getting a bit bogged down, but here in the dungeon of solitude aka the studio flat with attached shower room/toilet/cupboard/spare bedroom as I type away, there is still nothing really to say this is a special time of year any more.

There are lights up and I swear I’ve seen signs up that Christmas is coming, but…well…nothing else. It’s all got lost in the grey wilderness that is London, and in the meantime, there is still much work to do, so get to it or Tiny Tim will die!

Christmas; It’s just hollow, the majesty of it, the atmosphere, the good times, does anyone else think that now we all meet up, complain, eat , get drunk, complain about being drunk and then say bye for another year then return to the caves we came from?

New Year’s for instance is actually worse, in that for that little bit of time, people think it’s a new year, which means new me, achieve goals, lose weight (oh yes, remember all those f**king fitness DVDs will be on sale at one minute past midnight January 2nd) whereas we all know it’s bulls**t but we can kid ourselves for a few weeks where this is the year we change our career, move somewhere else, or meet that special someone.

Well stop it.

Stop it now.

Unless you really going to do something, keep it to yourself and you won’t hear anything from me in return. Jolly good.

Ok, that was a little harsh, but perhaps my mood has not been one of anything other than sobering realities of recent times and perhaps the wisdom of age is starting to creep in that in the grand scheme of things, this is as good as it gets. Really, as strange as it sounds, this might be the high point of our lives right now, and then that’s it.

Groundhog year will repeat until it doesn’t for you any more.

Hmm, maybe if i got some ghosts visiting me then it might come as a welcome change to what actually happens. Me getting off my arse and doing something laudable in life?Humbug.

Good December to you all campers, and for those of you still wondering if anything happened aside from getting annoyed by the over hyping of Call of Duty Modern Dustpan and Brish 12: The next insult in November, the answer as far as the blog goes is no. Most other sites on the internet of course tell you differently

So enjoy this piece of video from U-bend which did the rounds during November:

How that makes up for anything over November I have no real idea to be honest, as really it’s just a rubbish attempt to say “Hey Guys, what’s new and have you seen this!?!” to which most people would respond P**s off, you stealing my oxygen.

So much has happened, so little time and so little drive to do anything at all. I suppose more profound things could be written in a witty and downright trouser tickling manner, such is in keeping with previous works here, that the honor of beholding such literary prowess should be kept for another time.

For those wondering, suffice it to say, yes I’m still about, still working hard with nothing to so for it. Business as usual as they say.