“I wish my son had cancer” – My thoughts on this

So, I hear that there is another campaign being started up for Duchenne. “I wish my son had cancer”. I understand exactly what this guy means. With cancers there is the chance of a remission but with Duchenne there is none. Duchenne WILL kill you and they can only try and delay it. At the moment I am 26 and greatly benefiting from some of the effective treatments available. Nocturnal ventilation, Steroids, Heart Meds and Cough Assist Machines to name but a few. These things have greatly increased my life expectancy and quality. Also I am alert and aware. My life is tough, challenging and sometimes painful but I get through. It can always be worse and in my opinion people who have cancer are fighting equally if not more. I am almost paralysed from the top of my head but all of the treatments I use are pain free. I do not have to go through gruelling chemotherapy sessions which may or may not work. Whilst I don't agree with what this guy says I applaud him for his courage. At the end of the day all us guys can feel are things we can’t touch such as love, which this guy has plenty. Loads of kids die of cancer everyday so you need to think carefully before you actually wish that.

I want to offer the following words of support. When I was diagnosed there were to my knowledge no medicine based treatments at all. Average life expectancy was teens. I survived. When I was 16 I started nocturnal ventilation, heart meds and steroids. I survived. Ten years later I am still here and the average life expectancy has followed me. The average life expectancy is late 20’s in most cases and often much later. Imagine if I'd started these treatments earlier. These treatments are available for you now. I am sure when this guy’s son reaches his 20’s better treatments will emerge and life expectancy will increase.

All you can do is concentrate on life quality.

Peace out.

My Pet Hates 2 - Blood, Dust, Fluids and Other Particles on the Camera.

This one really does my head in. I like my programs to be quite realistic especially some of the crime ones. However, the idea that I am actually in the scene I find rather irritating. In my opinion the camera therefore your TV screen is a window into the scene and should not be treated as though it is actually there. The camera is only so you can see what is going on it should not be affected or be influenced by what is going on around it unless it is meant to be filming in a fly on the wall or documentary style. I don't like it when in gory scenes the blood ends up on your screen; I think that in order to be realistic they have taken away the realism. I don't understand what they are trying to achieve by this. It is probably perfectly acceptable to everyone else but not me. You may suggest that my mild OCD tendencies are making me criticise more mundane things but I suggest you that the world is wrong not I. Are you trying to make me feel like I have been splatted? I take it they don't do this in adult movies? No, didn't think so but then I haven't really done any deep research into that. I don't like watching programmes where it feels like I am walking around holding a piece of glass in front of me. If you're going to do that, why can't you give me an option to turn it off? I thought that all these TVs were meant to be smart now.

“Would you like particle effects to block your view of the current scene?”

“No!”

For that matter while on this subject I really like the program Game of Thrones but sometimes I find that the amount of nudity in it really makes it hard to concentrate on the plot. I would like it if they offered an option to blur it out every now and again. I mean I am in a wheelchair and for other reasons I don't get laid too often. Now you try sitting down and watching that.

“I know, to take my mind off getting laid I will watch this program about dragons, that shouldn't have any boobies in it”

“Wrong!”

Back to be camera in the scene thing, I suppose that could come in handy in this program as protection from fire breathing dragons. However, I don't think that could even come close to protecting you against the excessive use of the C word. That a terrible word and I don't know why. Even the most foulmouthed person when they hear that word shudder, it cut through the air like a hot knife through butter. The funny thing is in my opinion the opposite of that word is dick and that word gets thrown like there is no tomorrow.

So to summarise I don't like particle effects hitting the camera as it is filming fictional programs. I don't like it when a programs plot is blocked out by loads of people doing the sideways shuffle. Finally the C word is my least favourite word even though it occasionally pops out especially when things don't work.

Nonsensical rant over, Bert out.

My Sim City 2013 Experience

One of my favourite games and in my opinion one of the only games that I can't truly 85% play is World of Warcraft. This is the only game that I had until a short while ago on my PC. It can be played almost entirely with the mouse and on-screen keyboard. The only bit I can't do is in one of the dungeons where you have to jump but in that instance I can get my PA to help. One of the things I am addicted to is games on Facebook. I love Farmville, CityVille, ChefVille or anything with Ville on the end. I really enjoy building cities. Having millions of friends to do it irritates me a bit and that that they are always trying to force you to pay for the game although that is optional.

Imagine how happy I felt when SimCity 2013 was announced. I immediately looked for previous games and came to the conclusion that you could play with the mouse. Hurray. I waited months for this game to come out and I even tried to be a beta tester but was not selected. With as in my pants I eagerly downloaded before the release date so that on this date I could play straightaway. I even considered staying up till midnight so that I could play it in the early hours of the morning. That is how much I was looking forward to playing it. I decided I am tired and unless the night is the end of the world this game will be there tomorrow. So I went to bed. I got up rather early (okay 11) and five my computer. With all the excitement of a rat dressed up as a ferret. I almost had what we call a nerdgasm and guess what? The game wasn’t there. I had downloaded it and everything was installed and working order sort of. It just did not work. Everyone in my region (Europe I guess) tried to play it at the same time and because you have to be online all the time to play the service could not handle the load. This is strange because the MMORPG games have been doing this thing for ages. I paid quite a bit for this game so I was very disappointed. This was only the beginning of all the problems. In my opinion the game was not really ready to be released. I appreciate that there is no way to fully test a game like this. The game however should have functioned. They should have had many more servers and they actually needed and then they could have cut back on how many they had after the initial release date. I wasn't going anywhere so that had to wait. I still don't quite feel secure playing it because I know that some cities just vanish. There are also some things in it that make the game unplayable. Such as no matter how many fire engines you have they all go to the same fire no matter how big.

All Sims will take the shortest route possible to their destination regardless of traffic conditions at that time. Because the traffic is always that bad the emergency service vehicles take ages to get to their destination. Also the Sims are really stupid and keep setting fires which sometimes gets resolved by educating them. The other thing that really irritates me is the fact that it takes ages for other cities within your region to gain access to things that you have a lot and to accept gifts sent from one city to another. This is one of the things that they advertise to make the game sound good. The fact that you can team up with other cities to achieve goals. I could make one city with a sewage plant and all my other cities can send their sewage to me to treat. This enables them to worry about bigger and better things. The area you have to work with in order to build your city is that small that this is necessary to build nuclear power plants and rocket launch pads and so on. In order to try and appease the masses EA decided to allow people who have downloaded the game to also download a free game to make up for it. I think I have waffled on long enough for now so I will get onto that later. For me however it is easy to get over being disabled because I have no problems for it just feels like another kick in the face when these guys turnaround take the mick.

This is how I felt at the time of writing this. They are rolling out updates quite often trying to resolve the issues and once all of these issues are sold this game will be a solid 10 out of 10. Anyone issues with it from my point of view are probably due to the fact that I am a rubbish mayor. If all the future consoles are going to have this always online feature they had better learn from this and don't allow people to not be allowed on the game. If that happens they lose a lot of profit.

Note: just as I uploaded this they have just updated the game with update 1.7 which has quite a few traffic improvements which just shows that they are slowly getting there but that they probably release the game a few weeks too early.

I Love Games

I really love computer games so much so in fact that I went to University to study them (not play them). I actually wrote on my UCAS form that the reason I like videogames and want to study them is that in a virtual environment I am the same as my peers. I can run, jump, shoot and drive just like any of my friends. I am on an equal playing field. My disability had no effect on the games I could play. Actually at this time the only thing I could not do in any of the games I had was being metal gear solid where you had to repeatedly press the circle button really quickly so that the main protagonist would not pass out whilst being electrocuted. That did not really bug me too much as it did not really affect the overall outcome of the game. Unfortunately as my disability deteriorated the finer motor skills in my hands began to fail. At the same time that this began to happen, games consoles started to become more involved. A lot of the games now seem to require standing such as the Wii. Even on the other consoles such as the PlayStation and Xbox moving the control in 3-D space around you is a component of gameplay. At the very least playing on consoles today requires much more strength and dexterity than I ever remember. Now you have to be relatively athletic to play these games. That has benefits if you are in need of exercise and in this country is unpredictable climate that is a good thing. However for my kind is starting to rule us out playing these games. As this started to happen I began to turn my attention to PC games instead. As I was at university studying computer games I use that as an excuse to get the most high spec PC I could afford. I could still use the keyboard at this point so I began playing some rather good first person shooters such as half-life 2, doom and far cry. I did have a go at counterstrike but people were killed me before I even got to play the game so I got fed up of that. I believe half-life had a good subtitle option and a colour blind mode which shows that they were at least thinking of people with different abilities. After a while my left hand just stop functioning as a hand, if I'm lucky I can bash a single button but that's about it. When you have games that require your left hand to move, jump, crouch and so on it means that with my skill first person shooters or any game where you are moving about in 3-D space becomes really tricky or even impossible. I get really frustrated quite easily so I have just had to turn my back on 3-D shooters and racing games altogether. I still really like computer games but now I am limited to voice commands which aren't really there yet and mouse only games. Sometimes though I can use a switch interface to access one or two buttons such as space or enter. The only other issue I have with mouse only is that the type of mouse I use only has two buttons and no scroll wheel but most games have a way around that. Just because I cannot play console games or most PC games does not mean I cannot play games at all. The scope of games that just use a mouse on the Internet is massive but apart from that brilliant games but some Internet game developers create I do look forward to the next blockbuster game titles.

Christ the Redeemer

After weeks and weeks of practice I think I have finally found something that I am pretty decent at. It was one of those things that were underneath my nose for ages. It turns out it was a pixel art and very basic paint packages were all that I needed. I like to do the cartoony isometric images as I showed you on a previous post but I also like to trace some images into flat drawings. I spent quite a bit of time doing a trace of Christ the Redeemer in Rio. I have to admit that I wish I was a little bit better at drawing faces but you have to admit for a first attempt it isn't all that bad. At the moment I would like to draw my own version of relativity, you know that picture with all the staircases. I still need to research and practice if you of the various different objects in the scene such as stairs, arches and people but once I get them down I should be okay to start. One of the things I have found is that all tutorials on the Internet and not very good. I mean don't get me wrong the people who have made them are very talented but the tutorials are not ready for a complete idiot like me. Most of them have pointed me in the right direction but the best thing I can advise anyone to do is use one of the many tutorials to learn how to make basic shapes such as cubes, circles and triangles. Then also use them to learn how to shade relative to the light source and then figure out the rest on your own. One thing I would recommend would be in a scene to draw the smallest details first such as windows that way you can ensure that you leave enough room for everything you wish to draw. Check out my gallery for my masterpieces. Click here to jump to my latest piece.

I’m yet to be Defeated

I decided to have another go at my pixel art. There was no way that I was going to be beaten by a computer. After a few hours scouring the Internet for a decent piece of software to do my art I found something that would do the trick. First of all I had a go at all of the obvious choices such as photo shop, paint shop and CorelDraw. All of these really cumbersome, advanced and expensive tools were just too much for what I needed to do. Then I tried some free pieces of software. These were GIMP 2 and Paint .net which I eventually settled on. As I mentioned in a previous post my eyes are not what they used to be and whilst I still struggle with colour selection with this program I can zoom in to about 3600% on a pixel grid which is more than adequate. Also it has some of the functionality which helps with any kind of art such as layers and transparency. The only thing I find a little bit fiddly is copying and pasting, rotating and forgetting to turn anti-aliasing on and off. I spent ages practising and doing tutorials that I found on the Internet. It took me about a week to perfect a simple cube and even longer to perfect circles. Anyway after quite a bit of research I sat down and decided to draw a building that was quite near to where I live. Well that took a week and you can see the result at the bottom of this post. I used a bit of artistic licence and altered the windows, central tower and chimneys but you get the idea. I still can't sing but I think I have proved that I am at least a little bit arty.

My Pet Hates 1 - Straws that think they are a spoon!

I am not a big coffee drinker; I don't particularly enjoy it all that much. There are only two occasions I drink it. I would drink it while I am still in bed on a morning to try and wake myself up. I would also only drink it in a coffee shop. I know people have a variety of different opinions regarding copy shops but I love them. I love the smell, the colours and the atmosphere. The only things there I will ever drink are the lattes, cappuccinos, mochas and speciality limited edition drinks if I’m feeling special. In the summer I may treat myself to one of those frozen coffees to. The problem arises when I can only get hold of one of those funny straws that thinks it is a spoon. You know the one I mean. For the most part it behaves like an ordinary straw except for that last centimetre where it is a spoon. I do not understand what the point of this is as they've already have spoons which come with the drink. Even then those very spoons do the same job as the spoon on the end of the straw. This really bugs me because the straws are quite stiff so if you bend them you can no longer drink through them and because the last bit is a spoon it has no suction. This means that I can no longer drink the rest of my coffee. I would prefer it if they just had either spoons or straws and not all these confused utensils. It is not just a problem with straws and spoons; it is also a problem with spoons and forks. To be honest I think it might be the spoon that has the issue. I understand what the purpose is. It’s for those slushy drinks so that you can eat the ice at the bottom. I ask you when have you ever drank a slushy drink fast enough to get to the bottom to the ice without getting crippling brain freeze. It just does not happen. Therefore Starbucks, Costa Coffee and Nero’s I implore you stop this madness and let me enjoy my coffee in peace, comfort and convenience. Thank you and good day.