European Championship Final preview

Shrewsbury Town flag!

I haven't posted much about the Euros, but suddenly England are now in the final. This seems to be against many people's expectations (including mine!) as the team hasn't exactly lit up the tournament with scintillating football. (Spain, the other finalists, look scarily good.)

Whatever happens on Sunday, England will make history - either winning the Euros for the first time or being the first country to lose two finals in a row. The second option isn't the sort of history anyone would want. But it's still remarkable.

I missed England's quarter-final win over Switzerland last Saturday because I was driving back from Oxford, where I had seen Barry Town get hammered 9-0 in a pre-season friendly. 

I listened to the game on the radio on the way home and arrived back at my house just after the penalty shoot-out concluded. Driving while trying to listen to commentary on a penalty shoot-out was a novel experience and not one I want to repeat.

Unfortunately, a fixture clash meant I missed last night's semi-final as well. Instead I was at a meal in honour of a former colleague who is leaving a hospital diabetes service after 20 years. There was a chance to follow the action as the game was on in the bar of the pub we were in. 

I got into my car after the meal. There were 5 minutes to go in the game. The score was 1-1 and I thought if it went to extra time and penalties I might get home in time to see the shoot out. But it didn't even go to extra time...

Instead Ollie Watkins, who had come on as a sub, scored an incredible goal on 89 minutes and 59 seconds that effectively won the game for England. Fun fact: a few months back I saw Ollie Watkins at a football match when I went to see Truro City play Torquay United in Gloucester. And now he's England's hero...

As I have listened to both England's recent wins on my car radio, I am wondering how much England-supporting friends would pay me to sit in my car on Sunday night and listen to the final on the radio because it seems to bring good luck. I asked the question on Facebook and so far the highest offer is 57p.

Maybe I can watch from the couch. Fred, my Mum's dog has been pressed into service as a lucky mascot for a few of the games. He might bring more luck than I will.

I've seen a lot of posts on social media (mainly by my brother) saying "It's coming home!" That's a reference to a well-known song that was massive when England hosted the Euros in 1996, 28 years ago. (Maybe it is time for an England win.)

Also, if it does "come home" then that's the end of that mantra. Next time round it'll have to be "it's staying home!"

Outsourcing memories

Various apps are annotating my life. I've blogged about the Futbology app previously. Recently it has started pinging me reminders of football matches I attended, and have logged on the app. These are similar to 'Facebook memories' that often come up related to stuff I posted dating back to 2007 when I joined the site.

My Futbology reminder on 5 September is for Newport v Wrexham in 2010. 

That's not a photo from the game in question - it's their generic photo for Newport Stadium where Newport were playing at the time.

What Futbology doesn't know is that the game was moved from the Saturday to the Sunday but I didn't know so I ended up at the empty stadium on the Saturday wondering what was going on. This was long before I carried a portable computer connected to the Internet in my pocket.

I had totally forgotten that aspect of the game, except that I got an aforementioned Facebook memory on 4 September that cryptically mentioned driving to Newport on a fruitless trip, and then the reminder today revealed why!

Facebook then handily provided me with these reminders of the action from the game, including a missed penalty.

There were more updates about the game, with details I didn't remember. It made me think about how so many of our memories are now preserved online -  we are effectively outsourcing them. These are the memories of my "cloudgangers", as Douglas Coupland termed them. These digital versions of my life, stored on servers around the world, retain knowledge of the events that shape who I am long after I have forgotten them. 

This does make me wonder if there is a statute of limitations on our cloudganger memories. We change as humans, but our preserved content does not change. Can it truly be seen as representative of us, when we are new people?

This question might seem trivial, but this week a professional footballer was disciplined by the Football Association for the content of a social media post made in 2012, when the player in question was 14 (and long before they became a professional footballer). 

This made me feel slightly uneasy. Firstly, should we judge anyone as adults based on what they said or did as 14 year-olds. Most of us were dickheads when we were 14. Secondly, should we really hold people to account for opinions they held 9 years ago without checking in with them now? This blog has been running since 2006 - I have changed my mind about a number of things since I started.  

The choice seems to be whether we delete the record and lose the richness of who a person is, their faults and failings in their history. Maybe we should seek to expunge everything that does not represent who we are in this moment, recognising that everything we commit to the servers now might be deemed expungeable in a few years' time. 

But if we radically revisit our past selves and seek to remake them into versions we can accept, then we lose the sense of development that enabled us to reach the point we are at. We learn more from owning our past mistakes and explaining why we would do things differently now, than from pretending it never happened at all. 

Otherwise our cloudgangers may be highly accurate replicas of us, but have no memories. 

Things I'd like to see less of in 2013

Presuming the apocalypse turns out tobe a non-event, here are some things I'd like to see left in 2012

People Facebook tagging me in photos of their babies
I know you think everyone in the world wants to see every photo of your precious bundle of joy, but trust me on this, nobody in the world finds your sproglet as enduringly fascinating as you do. I’ll see your photo on my timeline anyway. I don’t need notifiying that twenty-seven people like a photo that I’m tagged in when I’m not even in it. It’s annoying. Next person to do it to me will get a comment about how ugly their child is.

Media fawning over the Duchess of Cambridge
It’s nothing personal. I’m sure Kate’s a nice gal and there are far worse people who could be in the papers every week (cough, cough, Katie Price, cough). But she should be allowed to be pregnant in private. We don’t need ridiculous baby bump photospreads taking up acres of newspaper space. Leave her alone!

Adverts for staged 'reality' TV shows
Just the adverts for Made in Chelsea annoy me. If I wanted to listen to a collection of narcissists awkwardly pontificate as if everything they say is cosmically significant, then I’d pay attention to the pundits on Match of the Day. Speaking of which...

Montage introductions to the ‘big’ game on Match of the Day
I tune in to watch the goals, flashpoints and other highlights in the football, not to be subjected to the work of the film studies intern who thinks banging together a load of fuzzed up footage over an indie track is somehow ground-breaking. There was one a couple of weeks ago that was so tenuously linked to the game in question even Gary Lineker, the master of non-sequitur segues, said he didn't know what it was about. It wasn't so bad when it was a very occasional bit of filler. But this is a case when less is definitely more. And none would be better.

Erofic
I’ve not read Fifty Shades of Grey because, like Twilight before it, it looks godawful, people who’ve read it say it’s terribly badly written, and it’s incredibly popular, which as a general rule of thumb means it’s going to be trash (the lowest common denominator is firmly at work when it comes to culture, witness the unwatchable crud of Saturday night TV schedules). Unfortunately, judging by the garbage clogging up the supermarket bookshelves, it seems every publishing house is now trying to cash in on the Fifty Shades success, even down to making sure there’s a ‘colour’ in the title and the cover is a random object artfully shot in black and white.

The person whose mug this was does occasionally read this blog

And if he reads this he'll be relieved to know that I'm nicer than many of my Facebook friends...

(Pardon the typo in my original status - the shame!)

I used to really care about Facebook, now not so much

I'm much more about the Twitter now. Facebook has just got too full of other crap. I don't want to know that people have received fortune cookies, which awkward moments they identify with, or what their daily horoscope says.

You don't get as much of that on Twitter. (Spam followers, yes, but I'm developing a strategy to deal with those.)

So as I become a post-Facebook web-user, this cartoon resonated with me.

The Social Network, or, Facebook: the myth

I saw this film a couple of weeks ago and really liked it. Script-wise, shot-wise and acting-wise it is pretty much perfect.

But it is also a fictionalised account of a story that plays a little bit too emotively with the truth.

So, is it a good film? Can a film be technically perfect, while misrepresenting true events?

That in itself is an interesting question. Can myth replace, and somehow convey, truth? (Well, we all read our Bibles, don't we?)

The real truth of everything that happened in the formative years of Facebook is known only to the participants, and even then we have to account for subjective bias.

But this movie works because it rings true. For one thing, none of the characters are particularly likeable. They are all flawed in one way or another. They take each other for granted. They act in their own interests. So far, so true to life.

Criticism has been levelled at the film for being misogynistic. I'd say that's misguided. Yes it shows young men taking advantage of young women and treating them disrespectfully, and it doesn't outright condemn that. But speaking as a man, this is how many men act. Portraying it isn't misogynistic. It's embarrassing to think such chauvinism is perpetuated, but not portraying it would be dishonest.

In another way it rings false. Mark Zuckerberg has said that in reality Facebook was a lot of hard mundane graft, not partying with co-eds. Experience seems to support Zuckerberg. The geeks I know don't party hard while coding.

The end verdict is that it's a believable version of events and really that's what counts. I loved the way the story was told, and am smart enough not to believe that it's true. That's kind of how I react to films, especially ones 'based on' a true story.

And there was one stand out piece of dialogue. Zuckerberg is asked whether The Facebook is finished and says it will never be finished. "It's like fashion. It will never finish." I loved that line. There are so many things in life that will continue on. Facebook is probably one of them. The general trend towards technology is another.

Some people have described The Social Network as the movie about Facebook for people who hate Facebook. But, if so, this is a sinister message for them, because the central premise of the story is that there is no stopping point.

And that's food for thought for all of us.

Jongudmund's rating: 9/10

A little light relief for Friday

This Venn Diagram has been shamelessly pilfered from Despair.com. If anyone would like to buy it me on a t-shirt for Christmas I will be happy...

Taking cannon to fools, when all you need's a BB gun

Sometimes I over-react to idiocy.

I did this on Facebook recently, flaming the Daily Mail over the way they reported the Government's plans on raising the retirement age (which whatever they say is going to affect the poorest more), and the comment flak began as various people who had somehow slipped onto my friends list despite Tory sympathies weighed in with their opinions.

But my point was more that the Daily Mail's reporting was an indicator of its right wing bias, and deeply hypocritical. It irks me. But what can you expect from the paper that supported Hitler?

I have my MP3 player pretty much permanently playing Tragically Hip songs at the moment. The line from Coffee Girl sums it up. Taking cannon to fools when all you need's a BB gun. You don't need much to discredit the Daily Mail. Not when it's own inglorious history is out there in plain view.

Boneheaded Coporations

The buzz is Mattel/Hasbro are planning to sue Facebook for allowing Scrabulous to rip off Scrabble. As one of the half a million people who play Scrabulous pretty much daily, that is a) irritating beyond belief, and b) doubly annoying because it shows how stupidity is ingrained in corporate reactions to anything these days.

All across the world Facebookers, bloggers, Scrabulous fans and any intelligent person is saying 'What the hell are Hasbro/Mattel doing?' For a few quid they could pay off the guys who developed it and have access to half a million people. They'll have a Facebook presence any other global brand could only dream of and the income from the ads would easily pay them back what the Scrabulous set-up would cost (it's much easier to negotiate a good deal with someone you could otherwise nail for copyright infringement). Basically someone else has done all their R&D and built up a client base for them. Only an idiot would threaten that.

Plus, if they bought out Scrabulous, they'd look like a right on corporation who understand the ever-changing technological world we live in. And , more importantly, I could carry on beating Clare on a regular basis.

Instead with their copyright lawyers and legal threats they look like a bunch of grunting luddites with the commercial nous of a small walnut. It's a wonder they have any internet presence at all as they obviously hammer their thick-ridged skulls against the keyboards in the vain hope of communicating with other simian evolutionary throwbacks.

They are the boneheads who see a goose laying golden eggs and decide the best thing to do is kill it, piss off all the people who loved the goose and then try and sell them stuff. Morons!

My new nickname

"Hello, I'm Three Bingos. Nice to meet you."

(It's because I'm kicking butt at Scrabulous)

Playability

Often when you talk to someone frequently the same topics come up again and again. With my little brother it's the subject of "playability" in computer games. As far as we're concerned you can forget your fancy graphics and whatnot, what really matters is whether the game is playable.

My proof, if proof were needed, is Zelda on the Super Nintendo versus Zelda on the N64. I loved Zelda on the SNES - except I can only play it with Oasis' Definitely Maybe on in the background (long story, but for me the two go together). But on the N64 it was a so-so rpg, with huge distances you had to cover to get anywhere. It didn't look as good either. Zelda on the SNES was cute. On the N64, it was humdrum. Basically the "better game" lacked playability and effectively killed off Zelda for me, although the screenshots on the Nintendo DS adverts have almost re-converted me.

Recently I've been playing PacMan on Facebook, which is further proof that graphics only get you so far and it's 'playability' that counts. PacMan has been around for almost three decades and yet it knocks many other games into a cocked hat. When I teamed up for a game of Halo with Irony Boy, I loved it, but Destroy All Humans 2 wasn't my bag. One had "playability", the other didn't. Wii Sports is the defining moment in Nintendo's triumph of "playability". Of course the graphics are something else too, but there's a reason Nintendo keep bagging awards for Wii Sports - it's simply great to play.

My favourite top thirteen most playable games

Arcade/Spectrum/other truly ancient consoles
PacMan
Batty
SNES
Super Mario World
The Legend of Zelda - a Link to the Past
Super Star Wars
Game Boy
Tetris
Super Mario World 2 - Six Golden Coins
N64
Mario '64
F-Zero X
X Box
Project Gotham Racing
PlayStation 2
Zoo Puzzle
Gamecube
Super Mario Sunshine
Nintendo Wii
Wii-Sports

So what games do you rates most playable?

Two things I've learned today

1 - eating crisps and playing Pacman on Facebook gets your keyboard all greasy.

2 - there's still an archive of football articles I wrote about six years ago out there on the inter-web, including the classic Is Football a Religion?

Facebook group

I've started a group called 'I support a REAL football club'. If I haven't sent you an invitation via Facebook, you can still join up.

Seduced by Facebook

It seems most of my friends have been similarly sucked into the vortex that is Facebook. Unfortunately my blog output has taken a hit as a result because my sneaky online activities in worktime are now more Facebook than blogging. My own personal failing is the Scrabulous application. So far I'm unbeaten.

Got time to play Scrabble online? Send me a challenge. Who knows you might be the first person to beat me!