Internet Apocalypse

Get yourself down to your local museum with a camera and start hunting for dinosaurs. If you live in Manchester, London or New York, you’re in luck because each of these cities has excellent grounds for Dino hunting. There’s plenty of other cities with good places to spot ancient reptiles too! Here's a list of some beauties I spotted this weekend. Click any of the pictures to make them bigger.






Tyrannosaurus Rex: Weighed 6.8 tonnes, bipedal, 13 metres long. Carnivore. Cretaceous.












Diplodocus: Weighed 10-15 tonnes, quadruped, had a six metre long neck and measured 25m from nose to tail. Herbivore. Jurassic.











Triceratops: Weighed 6-12 tonnes, quadruped, 9 metres long, horns 1 metre long. Herbivore. Cretaceous.











Allosaurus: Weighed 2.5 tonnes, bipedal, 9.7 metres long. Carnivore. Jurassic.












Stegosaurus: Weighed 4-5 tonnes, quadruped, 9 metres long. Herbivore. Cretaceous. Jurassic.

There is no Adam only Zool! I went up the Empire State building last night and that’s what I kept thinking to myself. If you’ve ever been up there, doesn’t it look like the building from Ghostbusters??

Anyway, I decided to go down at 10pm on a Thursday night to beat the ques, as the building and its observation platforms are open until after midnight. To my astonishment when I arrived, there was not only a large que, but it stretched out of the door of the building and almost right round the corner! It wasn’t a huge issue for me though, and the line moved pretty fast and, before I knew it, I was inside one of the most famous buildings in the world.

The main entrance hall is very impressive. I did take a photo of it but I have found a better picture on the internet so I’ll add that one to this blog (better meaning straight, not blurred and it hasn’t got half a Japanese tourist standing in the frame). Typically, the time i got to go and see it, most of the building was under construction and an awful lot of the rooms I passed through were in various stages of being painted, renovated or rewired. Nevertheless, i did get to see some very fantastic art deco. The light fixtures, the elevators, the escalators... loads of little things I recognised from movies and comics I’ve been reading all my life. It wasn’t just Ghostbusters I started thinking about, I started imagining the daily planet and Clark Kent stopping lifts from falling down the shafts or Peter Parker standing in one of the offices presenting Jameson with his latest photos of Spiderman. All of these scenes seemed to happen in a backdrop similar to the one I was walking through. I had alot of time to think about all of this, as it took me almost an hour and a half to get to the top. (click the images to make them larger)

Once at the top, the view was spectacular. You can see for miles! I managed to get outside and take a few snaps, my photography skills let me down again though. Here is the best one of the bunch.

I’m into funk music in a big way. I like some Jazz too, having spent many a Saturday night in Manchester’s Matt & Phreds sipping whiskey and listening to some real talent. I heard New York had a great music scene so I thought I’d go check out what the city had to offer.

First mission, escape Central Manhattan. Times Square is definitely a spectacle with its massive billboards and shops. At night time, it’s fantastic to look at. However, walking through it is a nightmare and it reminds me of London’s Oxford Street, which is the fore-runner for my least favourite place on the planet.

I found a club called Nublu on Avenue C which was perfect. You’d never even know it was there unless you knew what you were looking for but once you go through the front door , the interior is dark, stylish, covered in graffiti and they have a great bar. On the subject of bars, I’m still getting the hang of when exactly to tip people in America. I was politely told off by the barmaid after not tipping her after my second drink. She explained that she doesn’t get any money for running the bar, she survives solely on tips! I tipped her for my two drinks sheepishly. For future reference, it’s $1 for every drink you’re served. I think on a busy night, it must pay a lot better than what our bar staff get in the UK, she must have raked it in last night. Do I tip them in Starbucks?

Anyway, back to music. I saw a guy who calls himself Curumin and his band. They were fantastic. Brazilian Jazz, Funk & Salsa is quite difficult to play on the drums. Curumin, however, was drumming it all perfectly and singing it as well! A very talented guy indeed. He had the entire room dancing by his third song. I’ll definitely be buying his album when I get back to the UK. I’ve embedded a link to his MySpace page (go! go! go!) so if you want to listen to his stuff, my favourite track is “cidade des homens”. If you can’t bothered to go there, his music sounds a little like old school Ozomatli without Tunafish.

I have re-located to New York for a couple of weeks so my posts until I’m back in blighty will be focussed around activities you can find there.

The first flowers of spring are flourishing on the trees in London... aaah how I will miss my smelly city. It brings a tear to my eye!

Today’s activity to try out after the apocalypse – eating massive sandwiches. I guess that you can re-create this anywhere, you just need bread and about £20 worth of meat from Tescos. I didn’t actually plan to do this, the procurement of said massive sandwich was purely accidental, I just thought that i had been ripped off massively by the delicatessen. You can find the Deli on times square, although i have totally forgotten the name. I guess words cannot express the size of the thing, so here it is in all its glory:

click image to enlarge

I ate half of it for my tea and half of it for my breakfast the following day. I still haven’t finished the cheesecake. I'm going to be massive by the time I leave this city!

This weekend we had managed to get some free tickets to see the Cage Rage at Wembley arena in London. I’ve seen a few live fight events before, but never mixed martial arts combat, so I thought I’d give it a try. And, in the spirit of true romanticism, I brought my girlfriend along with me too.

I wasn’t too sure what to make of the Cage fighting. The rounds were over very quickly in most cases and matches all seemed to start off well, punches, kicks and lots of movement, but almost all of them descended quickly into the competitors lying on the floor hugging each other. A couple of the contestants looked like they had eaten one too many ice creams at the sea side and their match was the most boring one of all to watch. I’m sure they all train very hard to become cage fighters and they could all most likely kill me in their sleep. However, I found that the hype machine that was surrounding the event had brought my expectations about the fights to such a level where delivering a spectacle that would meet my approval had become impossible. There were a couple of high points which I’m almost but not quite ashamed to say, were the points at which maximum damage had been dealt to a fighter. We saw one guy get a knee to the face and one fighter had his knee snapped by a Japanese leg lock specialist. Ouch.

I don’t want to blog for bloggings sake. If live combat is your thing, I’d recommend boxing or watching some Thai kick boxing which is far more exciting. I won’t be attending Cage Matches after the internet goes down that’s for sure.

So, the internet apocalypse has finally come upon you. ITunes is no longer downloading your favourite Pod Casts, the hours of illegally streamed media are no longer at your fingertips and your escape into the World Of Warcraft has been closed down indefinitely. What is left to live for?! Well, lets hope you have at least had the foresight to download this blog in its entirety or you’re really in trouble.

This blog doesn’t just deal with books and computer games. Its purpose is to provide a list of fun and interesting things to keep you occupied in the unfortunate event of your complete isolation from the internet and all the luxuries it brings to the comfort of your arm chair. Today’s report looks at the London Natural History Museum.

The museum itself is located on Exhibition street in London. The nearest tube is South Kensington, a two minute walk away. Before you even enter through the massive doors, you might be instantly struck by the sheer size and grandeur of the building that is the Natural History Museum and rightly so. Wikipedia assures me that the museum itself is nearly one hundred and thirty years old & holds over 70 Million items and exhibits.

Inside, the museum is split into four separate zones:

• Red – The planet itself, mainly geology. It has lots of video footage of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions as well as an earthquake simulator! The entrance into this zone is arguably the most impressive you are likely to see in a museum, with a long escalator ride which takes you through the centre of a massive sculpture of the planet. There’s a good photo opportunity here too.
• Green – Learn all about ecology. This section covers fossils, insects, primates and evolution. You have the opportunity to see a dodo (stuffed of course) and if you are lucky, here is where you are most likely to see specimens collected by Charles Darwin.
• Blue – This is my favourite zone. As well as the mammal room which has hundreds of models, skeletons and exhibitions of mammals, past and present, as well as some interesting models of the ancestors of today’s modern mammals, you’ll also find exhibits on human biology.. Best of all though, the blue zone is where you’ll find the dinosaurs!! Anna and I had tonnes of fun trying to name all the various skeletons and fossils.
• Orange – This is the Museums wildlife garden which is fairly pleasant. Being brought up on a diet of movies, video games, dinosaurs, sci-fi and violence, the plants didn’t excite me as much as perhaps they should have done. However, the Orange zone is also where the Darwin Centre can be found and this is perhaps the highlight of a trip to the Museum. There are a limited number of tours around the centre, which is in a separate building to the main museum and tickets can be booked at the start of the visit. Thankfully, they keep the groups small as they take people round the centre which is a good thing as we were directed around the centre, which is a fully functioning laboratory, by a real live scientist!! There are plenty of opportunities to ask questions as you are shown round what seems to be a collection of a kind of Noah’s ark of pickled animals in jars. I think a small amount of people may not find this as exciting as I did, either because they are squeamish, which is understandable, or because they are idiots, which is not.

Gruesome – the pickled remains of many creatures, from all over the world can be found at the Darwin Centre.

It is advisable to decide on maybe two of the four zones as, to get the most out of the museum and see everything, you will definitely need to visit a few times. Because of the unique seasonal exhibitions and the ever changing content in the museum, you are guaranteed to see something different every month too. And best of all, its all FREE.

One final thing, the NHM website contains hours of free video lectures on a wide spectrum of biological topics. The lectures themselves are given by engaging scientists, usually experts in his or her field of study. This is a really valuable and interesting resource that I don’t think the Natural History Museum advertise nearly enough.

With a backdrop so gorgeous in its design, a fluid game play style and a sexy new monk\assassin look for your main character, it is easy to see why Assassins Creed generated so much attention and hype prior to its release. For months, myself, colleagues, friends and the MOG Army awaited its release with anticipation and delight at the thought that one of the classic gaming genres, the assassination game, was about to get the 21^st century makeover it so rightly deserved.

The genre already had many gaming gems, including the “Tenchu” stealth assassin games and the fabulously brutal and complex “Hitman” series that had both set the standards high in graphics and game play. It seemed obvious from the day the titbits and teasers for this title were released onto the internet that the game intended to not only compete with, but totally reset the benchmark for the third person “stalk-and-kill” game play style.

I got the game on for the 360, my console of choice for the time being. (I may have to write a blog about the trials of choosing between the three big consoles some day.) Got myself comfortable, made sure there was a readily available source of snack food and alcohol nearby and began to play.

As soon as the game play starts, you realise the potential of the game, the movement of the character, the free running style he uses to move between buildings. The story allows you to quickly sample all the weapons and puts you in a friendly start area to allow you to learn the basics of movement, combat, sneaking and escaping detection.

Just as I'd hoped, the game is easy to pick up and learn with an intuitive control system and fluid character movement. The ability to clamber up onto almost anything in the environment and stylishly jump, flip, wall run or swan dive off it again still hasn’t gotten boring to this day. The character itself will seamlessly interact with the buildings and I saw no clipping or strange collision bugs. The NPC soldiers have an annoying habit of being able to climb buildings almost as well as the assassin can, although they are not nearly as graceful when doing it. I felt a sense of smugness when, after brutally killing a guard, citizen or beggar I managed to perform carious acrobatic escape manoeuvres, ending in a leap of faith into a bale of straw and off the guards radar.

Sadly the beautiful backdrops and fluid movement of the character don’t make up for the games lack of real game play and, once you’ve assassinated a few people, you’ll begin to realise that, not only are you completing very easy sub missions but they are all in fact exactly the same. Even the script for the NPC’s is identical in each city which completely bemused me. They have DIFFERENT voice actors, but the NPC’s all say the same thing!?! Not good.

The combat system is fantastic, especially the counter moves which offer you the ability to dispatch your enemy in a number of stylishly brutal ways, think Dead Or Alive 3, which offers a similar system for countering attacks.

To summarise, this game is great to play and good looking but it has no substance. I think Assassins Creed 2 will be the real winner, as I’m guessing they can spend less time on the combat & movement and maybe focus more on creating a game with more missions, more weapons or maybe an RPG element that allows the player to choose the skills and weapons their character can specialise in. The game gets repetative quickly, so i'd rent this, rather than purchase. Still, whatever keeps you occupied after the apocalypse eh?

Matter is the first of Iain Bank’s books I’ve read, not counting the Wasp Factory that I read quite a few years ago. I think he writes his science fiction under a slightly altered pseudo name as his fiction is published under the name Ian Banks. I checked and it IS the same author, but never mind I digress.

Matter is a novel that is part of a group of stories called “The Culture Novels”. They are all set in the same universe, a universe far in advance of present day where mankind has long since colonised new worlds, discovered new technology, abolished money and of course, has come into contact with various species of aliens. “What’s New?” you might ask, “this sounds very familiar, very similar to almost every other sci-fi book I have ever read” and of course, to a small degree, you’d probably be right.

What sets this book apart from your card board cut-out sci-fi is not just how rich the detail of the world is, and it is described perfectly as you journey through the story, really allowing the reader to immerse themselves within it. Sometimes it takes more than just a good descriptive narrative to really bring a reader into the story. So many times I’ve tried to immerse myself in a world that, for all the adjectives its author can throw at me, just does not take my interest. What really brought ‘Matter’ to life for me was the design on the many different civilisations you will come into contact with while reading the story. Banks has created a universe where humans and aliens of various levels of technology, from feudal civilisations that have only just discovered gunpowder weaponry, to The Culture, a highly advanced super race of humans that live their lives completely without consequence, their technology granting them the ability to not only completely control every part of their own physiology, but actually transcend their bodies altogether. The ideas behind the civilisations themselves, the ships they travel in, the worlds they inhabit and the way they communicate with each other, every facet is, at least to me, unique and refreshing. It is so difficult to find a story so truly original in a genre that is so full of copies & clichés as science fiction seems to be. I haven’t been exposed to anything as fresh as this since the DUNE novels.

My assimilation into the writhing mass of information, media, “user generated content” and pornography that constitutes the internet as it is today was not a sudden, over-night occurrence but rather a slow, building dependency on what is undoubtedly one of the most important collaborative projects in human history.

My first memory of using the internet is one from high-school, logging on to an internet chat room with some friends at lunch time and marvelling at the wonder of real time communication with people as far away as America without the use of letters or a telephone.

Of course, being only 14 years old at this point, naturally, we used this life changing, monumental experience to its fullest and spent the entirety of our lunch break insulting people thousands of miles away, safe in the knowledge that they could not do us physical harm. At least, not before we had chance to hide or blame the whole thing on somebody else.

How was I to know back then that the internet would become such an important part of my day to day life AND that eventually, it would be considered socially acceptable to spend time at my computer, not only acceptable, but COOL to do so… depending of course, on what my myspace page looked like, what applications I had on facebook, my latest you tube video or what pod casts I listen to. Now I depend on it solely for my news and entertainment, traffic and travel information, reviews on and purchasing of movies, books, computer games, hardware and software.

We notice things that don't work. We don't notice things that do. We notice computers, we don't notice pennies. We notice e-book readers, we don't notice books.

Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001), The Salmon of Doubt, p. 110

As the internet is integrated further and I enter the latter stages of net dependency or “addiction” am beginning to realise, not so much what an impact access to information and entertainment has on my life, but rather, what impact the LOSS of all this would have on my day to day life. So, much in the same way that the End Timers prepare for the end of the world, stockpiling food, water, medical supplies and books on that great wizard in the sky… so this blog will attempt to scrape together pieces of every day life, media, entertainment, sights, sounds and experiences that you may hopefully be able to fall-back on after the great internet tribulation.