National Poetry Day

I doubt that you know this, but Thursday was National Poetry Day in the UK. While the necessity of giving poetry its own day is up for debate, I don’t want to pursue that path because frankly I don’t really know nor care about the answer. Instead I thought I’d share some of my own poetry. I’ve not done this before because most of the poetry I’ve written is pretty crap. However of late I’ve started writing some poems that I actually quite like.

The premise is that I start with a photo that I’ve taken on my travels around the world and use that photo as inspiration for a short poem. The theme is Man’s relationship with the natural world, but I’ve only been sticking to that pretty loosely so far. The reason I’ve started doing this is that I keep getting bouts of inspiration and desire to write something, but no idea what to write about. A photo provides a really good focal point for this inspiration and allows me to channel it into something tangible.

Below are three examples, the first of which is about Hiroshima. To get some of the references you might want to check out this Wikipedia article .

Grey Skies and Falling Rain

Across the river from the bombed out husk
Is the bell that will always be rang,
And the flame that will never go out.
Sombre monuments to our destructive
Nature.

Innocent white cherry blossoms bloom,
Stark contrast to the empty concrete.
The solemn grey reminder of the tragedy
Of human progress,
In the hands of the barbarous.

The grey skies and the falling rain
–Nature’s pathetic fallacy–
Punctuate the grim scene.

The rain will not extinguish the flame,
And the bell will keep sounding
For peace.

While bombs rain
And sky’s greyed
By mushroom clouds

The second is inspired by a photo taken when I was skiing in Austria back in 2008.

The Cable Car

Jagged white peaks carve the perfect blue sky,
The shadow of the mountain bathes half of the valley in darkness,
As the sun gleams off the snow.
Sprawling forests dirty the perfect white floor
With snow-speckled dark green carpet.
Defiant, shoulders of rock peak out from the snow,
Breakers of permanence swimming in the sea of white.

Through the valley floor a road carves and curves into the snow,
An earthworm of humanity against the mountain giant.
A car streams along the road, flying towards the town,
Nestled just out of sight,
Surrounded by trees and half shadowed by the mountains.

And the people in the cable car sit and watch,
As they fly over the mountain along cords of ingenuity.
Their glass castles swaying in the cool alpine air,
As they observe man’s wild and untamed
Dominion.

And the third is inspired by my recent trip to the Northern Territory.

To Steal the Soul of Death

In the swamps of North Australia
In the Billabongs and the rivers,
In the shady jungle at the water’s edge,
Floating just below the surface,
Of the serene, wind-rippled water,
Lives Death.

And from the boat we peer into the middle distance,
Straining our eyes to catch a glimpse.
Lifting our cameras to steal the soul of Death.
To capture the moment we were mere meters from him,
To immortalise our close encounter,
In mere pixels.

So we can go back to our homes in the cities
And boast to our friends that we were so close
And show them the pixels to prove it.
And relive our risk filled trip into the outback,
In fictional detail.

While in the swamps and the Billabongs,
The crocs keep ignoring the boats,
And the straining eyes
And the cameras.
And wait for dinner to enter the water.

Two other poems in this embryonic collection have recently been published in Downright Fiction, which I encourage you to check out, not only because it includes some more work by me, but also because there are some truly fantastic pieces of work by others.

Empire Total War and some other stuff

Last week I reviewed the demo for Empire Total War and now that the full game is out I guess I’d better review it. I didn’t think I’d have time to play it enough to be able to do it justice by this weekend, but I think I have played enough to form an opinion. I wrote last week about the battles in the game because that’s all there was in the demo, so I wont go back over what I’ve already said, instead I’ll talk about the campaign game, which doesn’t feature in the demo.

For the first time in a Total War game there is a story element as part of the campaign game; The Road to Independence (or RtI for short) follows the colonisation of America and the American War of Independence. This is far more structured than the ‘Grand Campaign’ which is a lot like the other Total War games. While bursting at the seams with Patriotism, RtI works very well structurally and is a good introduction to Total War, however I was under the impression that it was meant to be a tutorial and if I was new to the Total War franchise I think I would have great difficultly working out what’s going on. The story itself is just a rehashing of the American foundation myth, ignoring the fate of the Native Americans and making the British look like a bunch of wankers. Amusingly all the Americans have thick north American accents even though the founding father would not have had an accent very dissimilar from and English accent. Despite it’s shortcoming it’s a pretty decent introduction to the game and is a nice change from the usual campaign.

There are a few changed from previous games, some of which are quite nice, some of which are necessary but slightly annoying, and some are just annoying. The main change is the fact that the game has now pretty much gone global; the campaign map now stretches across the world rather than just including the Europe and the Middle East. Thy have dealt with this really well, introducing different theatres of war which are separate from each other. It certainly adds a new dimension to the game, making control of the seas very important to transport ships and soldiers between different theatres of war.

Some other changes to the game, such as moving some building out of the cities and the introduction of a technology tree and the ability to research new things makes the game feel a lot more like the Civilisation games. To be honest I’m not a great fan of Civ; trying to go from the start of civilisation all the way into the future is just trying to pack too much into one game so it feels rushed. But they’ve really brought in the good bits from that game and left a lot of the crap behind. These new aspects stolen from Civ add more complexity to the game and taking the emphasis away from the warfare element slightly (although that still plays a major role)

There are a few really annoying changes however; the interface has changed massively, in some cases this makes it more intuitive, but for the most part it just makes the game harder to get the information you need. The great thing about the other games is that it was really easy to get the information you want quickly. Another annoying thing is that lots of very trivial parts of the map are not covered by the Fog of War for some inexplicable reason so you have to sit and watch what Northern Europeans killing each other between turns. You also have to watch your own troops ponderously wonder around the campaign map rather than just assuming that we all know how people walk and letting them just get there. These factors mean that there is rather too much waiting around between being able to do stuff.

To be honest this is just nitpicking; the gameplay is still fantastic and provides hours of fun. It has its flaws, but overall it’s a very good game and well worth getting.

Moving away from Video games now I was really disappointed earlier this week when they announced that the final headliner for the Download Festival was Faith no More. I literally have never heard of that band and given that their major selling point is that they influenced Limp Bizkit (who are also set to play the festival, *sarcastic celebrations*). Linkin Park and Korn (who again are playing the festival); I wonder why they had a countdown to the announcement in the Download website. I was expecting a really big band like Guns and Roses or Metallica, instead they hype up some 90’s crap. The line-up for the festival as a whole is pretty disappointing; Marilyn Manson and the Prodigy real fail to get me excited. The combination of Def Leppard and Whitesnake is pretty impressive, but other than that it’s all rather disappointing.

Staying with music and on a slightly betting note I recently discovered a band called Amity in Fame, an unsigned Austrian acoustic rock band, they’re pretty good and you should all check them out here.

Skiing in a winter wonderland

Well that was a fun holiday! Maybe the best Christmas ever, just beating last year’s trip to New Zealand, sorry I’m just showing off now. As usual I have a few complaints… firstly, the weather was pretty terrible for most of the week: driving wind, snow, bloody cold, terrible visibility. You literally could not see a thing for the first three days, which sucked a bit. It also made skiing pretty hard because, as anyone who has skied before can attest to, when there is no direct sunlight you can't see where the snow is piled up so things can get a bit tricky. It does however make for some pretty hilarious crashes though, so it's not all bad. Fortunately the sun did come out all day on Friday so I was able to get some very nice photos, which I’ll show you later.

It would probably be a good idea to tell you where I went now. We were based in a place called Obertauern in Austria, just south of Salzburg. It is a massive skiing area, with about 100km of ski runs. Plenty of easy runs for the physically inept, my mum for example, and plenty of much harder ones for the rest of us. It was my 3rd week skiing, so I’m pretty good without being amazing and there was more then enough skiing at about my standard. In fact I managed to do quite a few black sloped during the week, which was fun although very tiring, so tiring in fact that they made my older brother, who is build like a brick shithouse, start feeling it. Pussy.

While it was a really good holiday, there were a few things that got a little annoying; our hotel was really far away from the main town – about a kilometre, which believe me is pretty far when it’s cold and snowing, so we didn’t really go up into town in the evenings and do ‘après-ski’, which is the most ridiculous sounding thing ever. For the uninitiated, it’s when everyone gets together after a day of skiing and gets drunk, well there’s a little more to it than that obviously or else I wouldn’t be ruing the fact that we didn’t do it very much.

Although we were over there over Christmas, , they didn’t really make anything of itapart from Christmas Eve; there were a few decorations and the odd Christmas song in the restaurants, but apart from that it could’ve been any time of the year. This isn’t really a compliant though given that I get sick of all the hype of Christmas, in fact it was quite refreshing. On Christmas Eve however they did kinda go all out. In the evening we had a meal that was about 8 courses and lasted for several hours, after which we were not as full as you might think due to the fact that each course could easily have fitted onto the palm of a new born babies hand.

Along with writing, reading, playing rugby, being cynical and surfing endlessly around half-dead Internet forums, I quite enjoy photography. As will all the other things I’m not exactly good at it, apart from reading obviously, because any retard with one functional eye and half a brain could read competently. Anyway, I’d like to think some of the photos I took in Austria are actually half decent.

I know you're probably wondering why the sky is blue when a minute ago I was complaining that the weather was crap, well I took these on the one day that there was nice weather. Anyway, this was our winter wonderland for the week, pretty nice huh?

This one is of Obertauern, it's not all that big as you can see and it's pretty much just hotels, bars and ski schools. Suffice to say that, were it not for the skiing, it would be little more than a few ramshackle buildings, if that.

I quite like this one with the cable car in the foreground. It was taken coming down from one of the highest points in the area and as you can see the mountain range stretched back for a good long way, as you'd expect given that it's the alps. Just look at the photo damnit!

I think it was one of the most beautiful places I have ever been to in my live, some of the views were truly stunning.

this one I'm particularly proud of because what you can see in the top of the photo is the sun. Any of you who've tried photography will know that it is generally pretty difficult to take a photo into the sun like this, so I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Although its quality may be more of a testament to the quality of my camera rather than the quality of my photography.

This one is similar to the last one, and to be honest I'm running out fo things to say about them...

One thing I did discover on holiday; the best thing to listen to while drifting off to sleep is Pink Floyd. Psychedelic Rock just sounds so much better when you are half asleep, I don't know why and I don't know that relates to this photo, but in any case, Pink Floyd are amazing and you all need to listen to them more. See you next week.