It has 6 strings

I've not really picked up a guitar in perhaps about 2 years. Well I have, but not for any longer than about 15 minutes and I haven't learned anything new with it in any of those 15 minutes. I'm a lapsed guitar player and I'm also one of the worst of those: I've never played guitar properly, I think I'm not good and I've never played in any kind of group.

I've recently been talking to someone who's just got a new guitar and it's woken something up inside me. I think perhaps if I note some of this down I might pick up one of my guitars again and make some nice music at some point.

I might as well start at the beginning. You've perhaps just got a new guitar at Christmas or maybe you've promised yourself to take it up in the new year. Let's get started.

You'll need a few things. A guitar with most of the strings, you. If one string goes, you shouldn't need to stop playing and wait two weeks until you get to the music shop. Most of the time you can get on without the full complement of 6, but it is best to have them all really. If you lose one string, it's a good exercise to work out which note you're losing from a chord and how it affects the sound, or you'll have to play your riff on a different section of the neck and how that affects the sound.

I'm already getting ahead of myself. I assume you skipped the back-end of that last paragraph and he your two things. You'll need to get the guitar in tune. One day you'll have a guitar tuner you've bought specifically for the task, but right now, you can go on youtube or get an app for your flavour of phone. Once you've got tuned up you'll have a 6-string with standard tuning. Fat strings closest to your face, thinnest strings closest to the floor. They are most commonly numbered 1 to 6 from thinnest to fattest, but I think it's best to refer to them by their fat-to-thin given-names of: E, A, D, G, B and high-E (even though it's the lowest and nearer the floor, but it's a high note see?). Tune up regularly, even small changes - it's really good practice.

I think learning the notes is going to be a massive help later on. Some people write these kind of things off, thinking that they'll never get good enough to need to know any of it and they just want to strum some songs at parties and whatnot. Knowing the names of the notes will start to be a really useful piece of the massive jigsaw that's playing guitar and music generally.

The first things you're going to want to play are songs you already like. There're millions of guitar tabs about and they're great for getting playing things that sound like things you like, but they're often quite inaccurate and I feel they're only good as a jumping-off point. Go and find some tabs and have a go at playing along without and with the song. Take your time. You might only get 5 notes into the first riff, but keep at it. Play it a thousand times.

You'll have noticed that the tab just contains the numbers. Remember I said before about the notes being so useful? That's one of the reasons why tabs aren't the be-all and end-all. One day you'll really want to learn the names of the notes you're playing. I'll get into that some other time.

If you've had enough fun with a tab and you can get though some riffs, then go and buy a chord book. This series are my favourite. They get you playing and singing at the same time, stuff you already know. The singing's useful (even if you're terrible) because it shows you how much you're stopping and starting whilst playing - you really want to be able to play something through smoothly, even if it's slow.

Some of the chords will be hard, but persevere and try to transition cleanly between chord changes. A lot of the time if you're playing smoothly people won't hear a gap in the chord change and a strum of the odd open string.

Practice some tabs, get a chord book, practice tuning almost every time you start playing. Enjoy the finger pain. Shake off the tension in your clawed-hand every few minutes. CUT YOUR NAILS. Force yourself to play without pauses, slow and smooth, rather than fast and broken.

I've not mentioned, but rocking out like some kind of a bell-end is perhaps the most fun bit. Even if you can't play very well, it feels ace just to turn on some music (loud) and play any old shit along it ... just to feel like you're playing it right. One day, further on down the line, you'll be playing it right.

I'll try and make these as regular as I can. You'll be a good player by summer if we stick at it.

Zombies Run

Hi mofos. I know it's been an age since I rapped at ya, but I've been neck deep in the busy stuff. Not really. I've been as predictably underused as usual, but Christmas and other things have just got in the way of me posting anything useful.

I'm sometimes sat there and I'll have an idea for a longer-form post or something that I just can't communicate via my twitter right, but then the moment goes and my procrastination and inertia kicks in and then I just don't do it. I have millions - well, dozens - of things that I want to practice at, or start off with, but I seem to get caught in that laziness loop all the time.

Anyhoo, I've decided I'm going to write about an Android app that I got yesterday. It's a running tracker app, and for anyone who knows me at all you'll know that I don't run, but I do have to walk about an hour a day to get to work and back, and the app's tuned to let you use it as a walk tracker as well.

It's called 'Zombies, Run!', and simply by having the Z word in the name means they're likely to get downloads, but it's much more than just a name. On the surface, it's an app that tracks either time, an accelerometer (like a pedometer) or GPS to track your run or walk. So far, so normal. 'Where's the frigging Zombies then!?', I hear you ask. Well, the rest of the app is dedicated to overlaying an AR (augmented reality) role-playing-game over the top of this basic system, mixed in with some story-based radio plays.

I've only played through 2 missions so far and it's not much of a spoiler (unless you're an idiot) to partly talk you through the first one. You start off as a nameless, genderless person in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, being transferred from one island of humanity to another. You get a short section of dialogue about being in a chopper and about there being a rocket attack on your chopper and your chopper falling to the ground. You seem fairly undented by this and some radio person chirps in and says you'll have to old-fashioned jog to the next base. You're probably already about 4 minutes into your run by this point, but you'll just need to suspend disbelief as it's a game about Zombies anyway.

At this point your music player kicks in and you get to listen to your normal, running playlist on your phone. Every few minutes the radio person stops your playlist and you get some more of the story. In mission one they tell you to head toward some landmarks, and bob into a hospital to pick up something another, more deader runner dropped recently. The audio stuff is quite fixed and it doesn't really require you to run faster when it pretends you need to or to head in a particular direction, so it's more of a radio play that intersperses with your running music and gives some flavour to your otherwise bland run. By the end of mission one, you get to the base and are accepted as one of their new 'runners'. They call you Runner 5.

You can choose to set the run to approx 30 or 60 minutes and because I don't know anything about running I'm assuming that this is perfect for all runners. That's right isn't it?

I know what you're thinking, 'still so-far-so-runtracker', but that's not all yet. During the quiet parts of your run - when your own music is playing, you pick up items, like batteries, mobiles, ammo, first-aid kit. A robotic voice interrupts your thrash metal or whatever and tells you. Once you finish a run, you can spend your items on leveling up your base (the one you got to at the end of mission 1). I'm not sure exactly what this feature does or if it helps anything, in any way, but if you're a gamer this kind of shit is like catnip. It's that compulsive urge you get to collect more, earn some arbitrary reward, win ..... something.

I'm probably not going to start running because of this, but it is quite fun and I'm going to try and 'play' it all the way through. I suppose it's a bit antisocial if you run or walk with others and I know the recommendations for running are to do so without having something stopping you from hearing stuff, but people ignore that kind of advice all the time. So I will too.

The dialogue has been co-written by Naomi Alderman, who I've only ever read in some Guardian pieces and have disagreed with her in almost every single point she's made that I've read. Still, I've enjoyed the story and voice acting so far so I'm going to start afresh with her. The app is on sale now, at least in the play store and I paid £2.99 for it, which, in my beer system has already been pretty good value for money.

I have a couple of complaints about it. Not much, just niggles. First, I do abut 10 mins walk, followed by a train journey, where the app lets me pause the workout, followed by about another 25 minutes' walk. The app sees my train journey, while paused, as part of my run-distance, so I've been cracking off some pretty mean top speeds and runs of some 35k in about an hour. I hasn't given me extra batteries, or ammo though so I can't cheat - which reminds me; on googling this first time, one of the first hits was a site helping you actually cheat at this app. Some people eh? Second, the app just pauses your music while the audio play stuff is running. I see where this would be useful for podcasts - even though a podcast interspersed with an audio play would perhaps be confusing, but for music, I'd be quite happy for them just to mix the song down to a whisper. I'd also like the app to be able to feed into other apps. for instance my Endomondo feeds workouts into myfitnesspal and this is much easier than having all the apps running at once on the phone.

Cripes, that was a bit long wasn't it? Don't expect that again googlebots.

Just download it and let me know how you get on. And whatever you do, don't slow down when you hear the moaning.

Rob out.

Kickstarter Idiots

I've been watching a lot of exciting things happen in gaming recently which seem to revolve around the kickstarter initiative. If you don't know what this is, then please allow me to quickly summarise:

Kickstarter allows creative types to pitch ideas about, products, services or other less tangible things in an effort to get people to fund the development of said thing. Most of the time the funder will get an early copy of the item, but not necessarily. It's about allowing these creative types to produce some (perhaps expensive) works that they normally wouldn't be able to do if they had to go down more mainstream avenues, such as pitching to a major publisher, producer or investment group.

As a gamer I'm probably biased, but it seems that recently this site has had a lot of game projects attached to it. The reasoning behind this is simple; There were a few, very successful projects funded through the service and a lot of other people are keen to follow suit. These big projects like Wasteland 2 and the Doublefine Adventure blew away their expected initial goals and I'm sure got some dollar signs spinning away in other developers' eyes.

I've already pissed away quite an amount of money on projects that haven't come to light yet and I'm starting to question the sensibility of doing this for any longer. I have enough games that I've not played that I already own and already exist without throwing an uninsured investment against somethings that may quite fairly, fail in execution. I don't want to talk about me. I want to talk about idiots.

You can pick several levels of backing for a project. For instance you might want to throw someone a pound because you want to show some support for a project, but you've no real interest in it, or you can donate fifty, for a finished product, a slap on the back or whatever. Some projects have a limited tier system too. The first 50 backers can get GaymeZero for £10, but once those 50 have ponied up, then they have to sign onto the £15 tier for the same thing. Kickstarter people are idiots.

What you can see here is idiots signing up for a higher pledge, when there's spare on the tier below. These backers are idiots.

Then there's some projects that have some really good low-level tiers up to about £15, but then they run out of ideas so the tiers from there up to about £60 are full of useless things like PDF design documents, or your name in the credits or some shit. Anyone who's willing to PAY to get their name in a list of several hundred other credited idiots needs a good think about what they're doing.

Once you get past there it can get kind of silly. The Project Eternity has a $10000 tier. For that you'd get to meet the team who are making the game and play a boardgame with them. A board game! for ten grand! I'm sure this is huge load of fun, but if I'm paying someone ten grand, they're taking off their pants (that's right builders - if I ever need an extension on the house or anything - you're doing it in the nid).
Five people have paid ten thousand dollars for a game and a party and a board game. I wonder who these people are.

What'd I be in Game Of Thrones

I'd like to be approached in the street by a fancy-man touting for men and boys, who then goes on to explain  that rather than being some kind of a sexual predator he's actually a casting agent for interesting bit-parts in the Game of Thrones TV series.

I've been trying to figure out what bit-part I'd most like to be, and more importantly, trying to figure out if I'd mind getting my cock out as it seems most of the actors on the series are wont to do. (spoiler - I would)

There's a few options of general parts you could be, so let's look into them and decide which is best for me to choose when this strange man approaches me (or indeed any of us) offering the part.

1. One of the southerners
2. One of the northerners
3. Some kind of a peasant in mud
4. One of the swarthy ones from across the sea
5. A zombie-thing

I think the swarthy ones are cool. I can't remember his name and I don't want to have to look it up (even though someone remembering this character's name is a major plot point, yet to be played out) but there's one guy who is some kind of faceless assassin. I like him. I also liked the dancing-teacher, who wasn't really a dancing teacher, but a sword master - although with dancing like mine I could potentially cause more injuries than he could with a sword.

I don't really like many of the southerner ones, apart from the half-man. He's good. I couldn't play his part though, because: He already does; There's a certain physicality attached to the role; I'm not an actor. I also think that playing one of these southerner parts I'd mess up my accent more often than not and would have to be escorted off-set.

That leaves me as either a zombie, a northerner or a muddy peasant.

The northerners are ok. I could certainly talk like one of them without too much fuss, and these are the guys who more often than not have their cocks out. There is, however the thing about the skill in acting and also, a skill in being able to fight things - or at least act like it. I'm not cut out for this - and my haircut is probably wrong.

So, I'm left with a muddy peasant or a shambler. The shamblers seem ok and there's not much speaking involved - I assume. They do all look quite ripped, for zombies at least, and I doubt that the casting predator would be prepared to wait for me to get ripped. He's probably casted a load of ripped young lads already. Thoroughly.

Muddy peasant then? I'll just stop at home eh? Acting is so hard to break into. 

Just Eat, a house

I managed to cancel my Just Eat account over the weekend. I did a list of all the orders I'd made over the last few months and it made me cry. The list it generated for the month of October was 14 items long.

I want to say that this is not as bad as it sounds, and to some extent, it isn't. Sometimes Nic and I order a takeaway but she wants one thing and I want something else, so we'll order twice within a few minutes. Still. FOURTEEN orders in a month is terrible. Probably they averaged about a tenner each as well. This is maybe even on the low side. I'm sure I'm going to be saving a couple hundred pounds and a few dozen thousand kcals per month from now on. I might take up another habit to drain away an equivalent amount of cash. A lot of people are talking about that heroin stuff.

Rob out.

Games. Lots of Games. Nothing to do.

Do you remember when you a small child and you used to say that you were 'bored'? Over and over again. You were never satisfied. I've been like that for about 30 years.

I've got a weekend to myself and I'm sat here and as a last resort of thinking of things to do, I've decided to do a blogpost. I'm doing this because I've been talking to Frank today, not about drugs, but about posting blogs.

Here's a list of things that I can do, but aren't doing:

I have:
250 games in my steam account, mostly unfinished and almost as mostly unplayed.
60 games in my GOG account, mostly unfinished and almost as mostly unplayed.
30 games in my Desura account, mostly unfinished and almost as mostly unplayed.
20 PS3 games. See above
About 20 DVDs that i've asked for on wishlists and never watched. I'm sorry family.
About 50 books that.. see above.

Maybe if I buy myself something new......
Oh, you can be my friend on Steam if you like, you can just search for bobbobob. I'm hardly ever on there and I don't like multiplayer games, or other people, so it'll be a satisfying relationship.

Dead Cats anyone?

This is great. It's currently saying 'joining'.

I've been reading about this new game that Peter Molyneux's new company '22 cans' have produced in the last few months. It hardly seems like any time at all since he announced he was leaving Microsoft and it's impressive that he's managed to get a product out so soon after setting up a new company. It's not a normal game though. The game is called Curiosity and the entire point of it is to click away at the skin of a huge* cube that, much like an onion is composed of many layers of concentric skins. You click a pixel on the skin and that section is removed from existence. That's all the game is. One person, at some point, is going to be able to click the very core pixel of the cube and that person will be rewarded. A video link is a reward. I've seen video links and they're of variable use as rewards for anything. the catch is that only the successful player will get the link** and this player will, presumably, be able to distribute the information behind this link as they so wish, or not.

The link is supposed to be life-changing. I suppose everything is life changing in its own way isn't. Nothing's zero life changing.

It's still stuck on joining. Is this the game. Do I have to pretend how great it is and get everyone else to join so they can see the word 'joining'?

It blinked off joining then and said it couldn't reach the server. This is an exciting development, but I still can't say it's a game. I 'clicked' retry so I suppose there was a game element in that. I can feel my life-changing already. I'm much less likely to download anything off the play store made by 22 cans ever again. The good thing about change though, is that this impression may change over time.

It's still stuck on joining - brief flashes of cannot connect, retry.

*it has no real size. it's not a even a real cube. it lives in a computer see.
**everyone will get the info even if the winner is peevish. or there'll be riots - geek riots.