July Round Up
First up, recently in person a few people have chatted to me about things I've shared here and that makes me so happy! It's nice to know people are reading some of what I'm putting up here but also discovering new things because of it. If one person discovers a game, movie, article, book or whatever because I've shared it then it was worth it. Don't be worried about dropping me a message or saying it to me when you see me if there's something I've shared that you liked, that's part of why I'm doing this.
This was a busy month! The weather was fantastic here so I spent a lot of time just enjoying it, so nice to just relax in the garden listening to music and napping. I feel the need to make the most of it because I'll miss getting to do that come October.
I went to see Big grande and then the day after got to perform a monoscene with one of the members along with John Spillane. I haven't done a monoscene in a while and it was fun to do one again, it was also great that we were all on the same page.
Then on the following Monday I woke up and was quite sick for a few days. Some sort of cold or flu, I was mostly just exhausted but thankfully it cleared up in time for the weekend because it was a big weekend for me...
I took a trip to Galway to attend the World Premiere of The Badger of Balylbog in the Galway Film Fleadh. It's a feature length movie created by my friend John with pretty much no money and starring loads of amazing people from the Irish comedy scene. I never in my life dreamed I'd see myself in a film screening at a film festival! It was a really fun experience and it was so nice to be in Galway with loads of my friends, it felt like a school trip. Whenever there are screenings of The Badger of Balylbog I'll relay the info here.
I caught up on backing up my photos. I had gotten into the habit of doing this at the end of each month, deleting anything not worth saving to clear up my cloud storage and then whatever was worth keeping gets backed up to my media server. I haven't done it in a year though, so it was nice to have a year of good memories to look over. I was also recently looking over some photos I had printed, I want to get them into some albums because it really is nice to have a flick through a photo album to appreciate how good things are.
I was over in London for a day to see Oh, Mary!(more on that below), I went over with my friend and it was a fun trip and a good chance to catch up. I also very briefly caught up with my friend who lives in London who very nicely always gives me a bed to sleep in when I'm over.
I was out at my Mam's and now that I can drive I've started to move lots of the boxes of ym stuff from her house. I came back with a few boxes of old games and DVDs, going through them brought back so many memories and there's some proper rare stuff in there. I was reunited with my copy of Raising the Bar which I've wanted to go back through recently. I'm looking forward to going through it properly and also getting some of these old consoles working. I now have my old Dreamcast, N64 & GameCube but my PS2 has not surfaced yet. 😞
The end of the month was pretty busy with various comedy activities. On Thursday night it was MAyor of Comedytown, it's a show my friend Mikey co-created and involves the audience voting throughout the show using a voting system I created that lets them go to a web page, fill in a profile and vote for their preferred candidate. It was lots of fun and seeing charts on what demographics are voting for who was fun and best of all nothing broke on the night! Unfortunately that means as I'm writing this the day after I have the usual post-great show blues. I'm going to Comedy Bang Bang in the evening though so that will cheer me up.
Oh, I made this site display better on mobile and there's now an RSS feed for anyone who would like to keep up with new posts using that.
!!BREAKING NEWS!!
Dee had been missing all week, I hadn't see her since Monday and I was getting very worried. I was getting ready to start making posters to put in the area after there being no sign of her when I was walking around the place. Then on Friday I heard frantic meowing from across the road, it was Dee rushing home! She was starving so I think she got trapped in a shed or something, but I'm so happy she's back home.
From my blog
I wrote about shooting a new film stock and a food tour in Berlin. I have a bunch of drafts so hopefully I get more posts out next month.
Some good things I read & watched & listened to
Let's get the AI being bad stuff out of the way:
📃 How AI Is Ruining Education, In One Handy Chart
📃 Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster
📼 The Space Data Centers Situation is Insane
I wonder how much of this he believes and how much of it is part of the grift.
📃 Pickup Artist Mystery Has an AI Girlfriend
Good.
📃 The Backlash Is So Strong That People With “Pervert Glasses” Are Afraid to Use Them in Public
The Gist from Simon McGarr is always an interesting read on Irish politics.
📃 The Gist: The End of the 100 Year Government
I enjoyed the sentiment of this, it's an approach I have also taken on lately. I have lots of projects and I get to them when I can, I'm not stressing about them too much. Apologies to those waiting on more Hivemind, it'll be ready when it's ready.
📃 Reality just keeps unfolding
A good and fairly brief history of multiplayer games that goes a bit beyond video games.
📼 The History & Evolution of Massively Multiplayer Games
A very fitting game for Jank to cover. A nice story of someone's first foray into making games and covers the wonderfully broken but ahead of its time Boiling Point. Also Jank is very much worth subscribing to if you're into articles like this.
📃 The making of Boiling Point: Road To Hell, the most broken game I've ever loved
Second/fourth wave emo music is great.
📼 Ultimate Emo Fan Goes Deep on the Genre
Making an album as an indie artist is a lot of work.
📼 I tried making an album in 30 days
Summer Games Done Quick
I always enjoy catching up on the Games Done Quick events, there's one in Winter and one in Summer raising money for Cancer Research & Doctors Without Borders. It's a great success story within games for stamping out the more hateful side of gaming and I recommend reading the article below about that. I've also shared a few speed runs that I enjoyed watching from it.
📃 Games Done Quick's Long, Difficult Journey To A Better Gaming Future
📼 Super Mario and Luigi World: Brotherhood
Just some funny things I saw
Cats in boxes
A funny web comic
TV
Such Brave Girls
I re-watched this show, it's a very funny show about mostly unlikeable people.
Funboys
A odd comedy set in a small village in Northern Ireland. Some very funny stuff in this, worth a watch.
Make That Movie
I actually watched this last month and forgot to include it, Sam Campbell's show for Channel 4 is a lot of fun. The school episode was my favourite.
Info Wars
The now owned by The Onion Info Wars has been really funny, the lat episode I watched with the whistle blower who kept steering the conversation to Japan was fantastic.
Films
The Invite
Incredibly funny and surprising through out, perfectly paced and a wonderful use of sound.
Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie
Easily the best move from TV show to movie there has ever been. Goofy, silly, incredibly funny and leaves you wondering how they did this.
Carolina Caroline
A fun film about a criminal couple on a trip across the southern USA with good tension and heartfelt moments. Looks fantastic, great music and 2 leads that work really well together.
Games
Prey(2017)
I wrote loads about this here.
The Incident at Galley House
I've only played the first couple of hours of this but love it so far. The presentation is excellent with some great voice acting and the interface that's been created works really well and removes the cumbersome-ness of the original from Type Help. I'm looking forward to getting back to this, I'm playing it with my friend and it has definitely been a case of two brains are better than one. This remake is done by the people behind the previously recommended The Roottrees Are Dead and incorporates some of the useful elements from it such as letting you know how much info there is left to find in a scene.
Escape from Ever After
Another that I haven't finished yet, clearly inspired by Paper Mario this is a fun light RPG that doesn't really do much new. I'm playing on Steam Deck and it works well in 30 minute sessions.
Factorio
I'm not late to this, I've actively avoided it because I know myself. I finally picked it up and played it for about 6 hours in one day. It's a game where you automate a big mad factory on a planet to build a space ship to leave it, it's basically an abstraction of programming and I just get too into that sort of thing and lose hours of my life. It happened with Satisfactory a game that had me drawing diagrams on my white board for new sections of the factory. But if you're having fun with it isn't that the point.
Kaz
A great game to play in between meetings. Lots of variety in the unlockable characters to keep things interesting and a fun high score chasing game.
Theatre
Big Grande & Tiny
Two great improv groups in one night, a really fun show and always nice to see improv in the main space of Smock Alley.
Oh Mary!
This is one of the funniest shows I've ever seen. I knew very little about it going in so it was a real surprise. Absolutely worth a trip to London to see it.
Comedy Bang Bang
This cheered me up! I've seen Comedy Bang Bang live before and it was good but this time they were great. Fred Armisen was a surprise guest start too, I was srying with laughter.
Music
The Strokes – Reality Awaits
It's more modern Stroke, its grand. Lonely in the Future is excellent though, one of their best.
Charli XCX – Music, Fashion, Film
A contender for my favourite album of the year! A short fun album with no misses. The guitars across the album are class and the end of the album is weird and brilliant.
Books
Beautyland
I'm re-reading this, a wonderful book about humans and our world. I find it hard to explain exactly what I love about this book but I heartily recommend it.