Wings Over Sealand

Alert viewers may have already noticed a new addition to the central links column: The Sealand Gazette. (If so, they should award themselves 200 Alert Viewer Points and add them to their Viewerscore card.)

The Gazette came about because I have a bad habit of using Twitter as a sort of Post-It Note for news stories I want to keep on file for future reference. It is, of course, singularly badly suited for this purpose, because finding anything you posted on Twitter more than a couple of days ago is a hideous trial and – as I learned only recently – Twitter deletes your old tweets forever when you exceed your quota, which varies according to how prolifically you tweet but can be as little as a few weeks.

So instead, now there's the Gazette, the newspaper for people who increasingly wish they lived on an isolated former gun platform in the middle of the North Sea. Published through the rather nifty Scoop.it platform, the benefits are that it's incredibly easy to use – a couple of clicks adds a story – and both persistent and searchable.

(NB To search the Gazette use the "FILTER" function below the banner, not the Search box at the top of the page, which searches the whole of Scoop.it instead.)

At launch many of the stories are old-ish, because I've been going through my Twitter account grabbing everything I've posted there since April before it gets wiped, but from now on it'll be hot-off-the-presses stuff, and there's even a Page Three girl today as an introductory bonus. (Though of course, it's a rather sinister and troubling one.) Readers can also easily suggest stories to add.

The Gazette should be a lot less trouble to maintain than the short-lived "Reasons Not To Recycle" blog, and fulfil much the same purpose. (Misanthropic nihilism, essentially.) But I'll make a special effort to throw in a few nice stories too, because mass reader suicide isn't the goal. Although in the broader sense, it is a bit.

Much as Scots have grown accustomed to trying to pretend otherwise, you’ll probably have noticed that there’s currently another international football tournament going on without us. This evening sees the first appearance in the European Championship of the England team, the only side competing in the entire competition who don’t have a national anthem to call their own.

Over two decades of living in England hasn’t changed this writer’s feelings towards the country’s international team much. I still want them to lose – not because I hate the English people, but precisely because I like them.

Read the rest of this entry →

I was scurrying around in the WoS Archives this evening looking for something else, and I stumbled across this. It's a piece from April 2000 for now-defunct games-industry trade paper CTW, in which I interviewed Andy Smith of Future Gamer, the email magazine that eventually evolved into GamesRadar.

Marvel through your tears, viewers at the eerily accurate foretelling of the state of games journalism that was about to unfold.

Read the rest of this entry →

If you're a reasonably frequent reader of WoSland, this is kinda important. Just to the right you'll see a poll. (We apologise for the fact that it's a bit ugly, and in the sidebar rather than in the body of this post – failings which are a result of the absolutely startling shitness of every single WordPress polling plugin.)

Please take five seconds to respond to it. Thanks.

As huge crowds of primitive villagers turn out to marvel at some fire this weekend, here's some old-fashioned journalism to ponder. Click the image to read the article.

Enjoy the torch (possibly the last spectacle invented by Adolf Hitler to still be regularly performed and celebrated), and the two weeks of the Games while they last. Try not to get sick, in either sense of the term. Try not to be alarmed if anyone sticks a missile battery on your roof (and slaps an eviction order on you for making a fuss about it or for just not being lucrative enough), or a sonic cannon, or by the bored police with machine guns hanging around your train station waiting to shoot anyone who tries to protest or take an unlicenced beverage or snack into one of the state-of-the-art stadia.

Enjoy all the top events (on telly, unless you're a corporate sponsor), and as Boris Johnson gallivants around turning them into a giant Tory showpiece, take a moment out to give thanks to Tony Blair and the rest of Labour for making it all possible (with our money, of course) for him. Who needs hospitals and schools anyway?

Is this actually worse than bags of peanuts with "WARNING: MAY CONTAIN NUTS" on them and the like? In some senses, I think, it might be.

Sometimes – okay, quite often – I'm rather jealous of my good chums over on the world-conquering PC gaming site/shopping list Rock, Papers, Hot Gun. I enviously eye their devoted millions-strong audience, weighty peer credibility and enormous paycheques, and think "If only Podgamer could have lasted more than three and a half hours without everyone stabbing each other", and other such wistful regrets.

Then I remember that if I was on RPS I'd have had to devote part of my one precious and irreplaceable life to playing Diablo 3, and everything's alright again.

A few of my favourite lines from this morning's Eurogamer coverage:

"What all the Diablo 3 Error messages mean, and what to do about them"

"UK launch video, images, Iain Lee, people in wizard costumes"

"Though the downloader may show 100%, please allow some time for it to fully complete."

"The server is full. This is likely due to high login traffic. The only solution is to keep trying to log in."

"If you're still running into this issue, there may be an error in your foreign language appdata files. Some players have found a workaround, but please be aware the steps they provide are not something we can currently support."

"Error 3004, 3006, 3007, or 300008 – There are a number of possible causes for these errors."

The future of videogaming, there, viewers. No thanks.

You don't even need to be a particularly alert reader to recall WoSland's worrying piece about recession-hit Bath just a few weeks ago, which drew thousands of viewers from all corners of the net to become one of the all-time top 10 most popular posts on the blog. But this week, Bath's fall from grace was rendered complete.

The image above comes from a piece in Monday's Guardian about dereliction and decay in urban England (click the pic to read the story). The feature talks about northern working-class cities like Bradford, Redcar, Sheffield and Preston, particularly the various consequences (and, it posits optimistically, opportunities) presented by long-term disuse, decay and demolition of long-term empty properties. The picture chosen to illustrate it, though, is of London Road in Bath.

It's not, admittedly, the most salubrious part of town. But Bath is more accustomed to being employed to depict the grand Edwardian age in period dramas. To serve as a passable imitation of deprived modern-day Bradford instead may well be seen by the city's inhabitants as its darkest hour since it was bombed by the Nazis in 1942.

Over the last couple of years, I've been regretfully forced to the conclusion that feminism is the most intolerant ideology currently operating in the UK, leaving ultra-radical Islam trailing a distant second and looking on angrily. Disagree with the orthodox-feminist position on any gender-related subject, in even the most minor of ways, even if you're agreeing with the base principle, and you'll be first shouted down, then called a misogynist and/or "rape apologist" or similar, and then censored out of the debate entirely. (All three often occuring within the space of a few minutes.)

Veteran WoSland viewers may recall the Cara Fiasco, or the interesting "Dickwolves" discussion of last year, but by way of a milder illustration I present a recent Twitter exchange with "rebelgirl59", who appears from her comments to be some manner of activist for the Scottish Socialist Party. (Twitspeak tidied up, otherwise unaltered.)

Read the rest of this entry →

If they spend any amount of time browsing through Wings over Sealand, alert readers may well find themselves noticing a number of recurring themes popping up throughout its pages, and one of the commonest is a violent contempt for nearly all videogames journalism. This is because, not to put too fine a point on it, nearly all videogames journalism is a crime against humanity. (Either in the literary, ethical or sociological senses, and usually all three.)

Practiced largely by cynical-yet-incompetent careerists who regard themselves as essentially the games industry's door-to-door salesmen – rather than as a safeguard standing between the industry and the public, protecting consumers from wasting their money on terrible products – the dismally low standard of nearly all videogames journalism was and remains the reason why your correspondent felt the need to take the job on for himself, so that at least on occasion it might be done halfway-properly.

And if the 21-years-and-counting career that followed that decision isn't a reason to hate videogames journalists, then this reporter doesn't know what is.

Read the rest of this entry →

The 30th anniversary of the ZX Spectrum has sparked a flurry of nostalgia pieces in the games press, many of which for some reason can’t help comparing the Sinclair machine to its main American competitor. And since the games press is a dictatorship of dullards, the C64 has come out on top in most of them, invariably helped by a colossally biased selection of judges.

Eurogamer, for example, takes a big dump on the Speccy’s birthday cake by calling on Julian Rignall (editor of a C64 magazine), Steve Jarratt (editor of a C64 magazine), Gary Penn (writer on a C64 magazine), Gary Liddon (writer on a C64 magazine), Jason Page (a C64 coder) and Paul Glancey (writer on a C64 magazine) – with only some three-year-old quotes from the sadly-deceased Jonathan “Joffa” Smith holding up the Speccy’s end of the debate – to come to the startling opinion that it deems the C64 the superior machine. Last month’s Retro Gamer reached a similar conclusion for much the same set of spastic-faced reasons. (“Whine bleat SID chip wah wah wah.”)

But fuck all of them, because they’re all cunts and they can suck our dicks.

Read the rest of this entry →

"Dear WoSland,

I've greatly enjoyed the series of pictures you've been publishing recently in lieu of proper features while you bang on endlessly about Scottish politics and neglect this formerly-popular blog. But I notice that you're yet to print a shot of a cheese biscuit that looks like an oil tanker being attacked by a gigantic mutant starfish. Please remedy this omission or, like so many others, I'm cancelling my subscription.

Yours menacingly,
Tired Device, Hackney"

Your wish is our command, Mr Device!