Rob’s Terrible Tomb Of Tat

…and you will know me by the typing of the dead.

  • Dreaming About Better Days

    You know what would be absolutely dreamy right now, in the year of our Molyneux twenty twenty and a six?

    Imagine if I could get to go a whole 24 hours, one whole Earth day, without having to give even the vaguest passing thought to someone else’s LLM use.

    From 12am to 12am, on any given day (though ideally every single day), I do not find myself having to waste valuable thinking time on someone justifying why they’re going to continue using some ruinous tech, without having to waste a single second of valuable thinking time on who did use some ruinous tech, to not have to read a single disingenuous comment along the lines of “everybody is using it in secret” when like fuck they are, without someone feeling compelled to pass a blog post or a video past my eyes explaining why the ruinous tech is ruinous because it has been I don’t know how many years now and surely by now it should not need pointing out every single day how terrible this stuff is.

    To never have to look at a fucked up picture that somebody got a machine to shit out, seemingly not caring that (or being completely oblivious to the fact that) it looks like absolute dogshit. To never have to contend with someone feeling compelled to dump an AI chatbot’s output in a forum or a comments section as though they’ve been reaching into the deepest font of human wisdom to source it and everyone must now clap. I’m not reading that, mate. Fuck off.

    We don’t even speak of the joke images people generate. Just awful.

    Picture it, an entire day where not a single second is given over to this utter trash.

    What a beautiful fucking day that would be.

    And I’d like a pony. A real one, not an AI generated one.

  • Adventure Rocket Ship

    Woke up way too early in the morning this morning so I figured it was as good a time as ever to enjoy myself by ploughing through a few hours worth of Robyn Hitchcock performances because very little cheers me up even half as much.

    I’m a firm believer that Hitchcock is a pretty amazing straight up songwriter (I think it was Michael Stipe who said that Arms Of Love, which REM covered, is one of the best songs ever written and they weren’t wrong) but I am me and my love of nonsense often wins the day and few people do psychedelic nonsense as well as Robyn Hitchcock. I mean, his recent-ish straightforward cover of Floyd’s See Emily Play seems as natural a Hitchcock a song as could be, sometimes he’s more Syd than Syd.

    Adventure Rocket Ship, recorded with The Venus 3 – and shockingly twenty years old this year – has some of my favourite Hitchcock nonsense.

    ”the skeletons of spacemen unzipper me with love” is not a line most people can generally get away with but in the weirdly horny sci fi psychedelia of Adventure Rocket Ship, it’s positively ordinary.

    And bless, Peter Buck seems to be having so much fun on these.

  • Data Jammers

    From The Archive

    Data Jammers combines three of my favourite things. Digital Eel, Motorways and a Kenta Cho circa 2005-6 aesthetic. Honestly, if you really want to know the way to my heart, it’s not flowers, it’s things that go brum brum vroom in neon colours.

    Obviously if you can make some flowers that go brum brum vroom in neon colours then maybe we can talk about that but until then, Datajammers it is.

    There’s a whole load of obligatory silly plot guff but the game essentially boils down to, as my good chum Lewie puts it, “going along a futuristic motorway really quickly”. 

    And that’s pretty much what you’ll be doing for most of Data Jammers. You’ll be going along a futuristic motorway really quickly. Of course, that the motorway bends and twists and splits off in the most hypnotic and curious of ways leaving you often dazzled at how criminally difficult this place would be for SCS to build a new Eurotruck Simulator game around is also a thing. 

    Of course, there’s the obligatory enemies too. It wouldn’t be a neon-soaked arcade game without enemies, right? (This is videogames, Rob. I don’t think you need to even ask this – Ed)

    At first you’re just kinda avoiding a bit of traffic and the odd elementary enemy that comes drifting down lanes towards you but level by level Data Jammers introduces new hazards to dodge, electronic scorpion shaped things with their stingy eye on doing you in through the face, holes in the road (with traffic barriers because even in the future, safety first), traffic cones, pushy zoomy things and all the other things you’re sure to find on the future information superhighway taken way too literally including bosses that amazingly aren’t rubbish like most bosses. Admittedly, they’re not the highlight of the game either but I’ve seen worse.

    What strikes me though is that everyone else in the game is in a car or robo-vehicle of some kind and you, the player, are bouncing around this high speed way-too-literal information superhighway in what looks like some sort of rubber ring. I know you’re an elite commando (because videogames) but treating this dangerous, twisty turny future roadway like a swimming lesson? Well now. There’s no need to show off.

    Digital Eel are clearly channelling Kenta Cho here and like a lot of Kenta Cho’s earlier videogames, it also feels like the kind of alternative universe arcade game that should have always been but never was. It’s the same sort of territory that Yak explores in TxK to a large degree albeit less obvious a homage to a specific work. Data Jammers is more the Spy Hunter that came out in a world where vector games didn’t disappear down the plughole. And I dunno, there’s something about the ridiculous motorway/data stealing stuff that feels very 2000AD:The Videogame too, which is kinda OK really. 

    In some ways, it’s another videogame future we forgot to explore and someone finally went “you know, maybe…” a few years too late and in others, it feels like the kind of thing that could only be made in these here modern times. It’s very eighties and very now. I like that.

    originally published on Take This Machine, July 25th 2015