The Dell of my Dreams

Well well, it’s been a long time since I wrote on this thing considering I have been doing video blogs and what not and as they say a picture tells a thousand words. Unless it’s my pictures, moving ones no less; they tend to be a little less subtle than what the medium generally aims for.

Nevertheless I have recently purchased a new laptop (and a great thanks to my sister who lent me the money for the time being) as my other more dramatic, tasteless, evil, demonic, bastardising HP laptop decided to go out quietly without letting me know until the last second. Wherever its soul (or lack of) resides now, I’m sure it’s gleefully playing in fire and ash.

"Look at it! Basking in overheated glory, feckin' HP!" 

In fact, I imagine some pour individual in the afterlife probably purchased my afterlife laptop thinking “Oh great! I can’t wait to use this perfectly ordinary laptop and go on Angelbook!” (Angelbook is my really lame joke name for facebook in the afterlife, I'm too lazy to think of anything wittier). But you see, this is the moment that individual will realise that they never went to heaven, only to hell for the moment they push that shitty little power button on that laptop they will have forever cursed themselves with 4 years of troublesome, overheating, battery faulting, charger not charging, dust inhaling monster that sits on their laps.

Anyways, my gripes have passed with HP as I’m never purchasing one of their products again. Instead I’ve replaced that shadowy dark hole of a place in my life with a lovely new, sleek, shiny, angelic Dell full of all the features of my previous laptop, times a billion more power (that might be slightly exaggerated) and all the free time I can muster. This means I can actually begin to do much more be it animation, video effects, editing and what not than I could’ve previously as I don’t need to worry that my laptop with explode taking out half of the neighbourhood.

"My old HP Laptop didn't turn itself off when it overheated, instead it went the next mile...splitting atoms"

I’ve even “acquired” many new training videos for all of my “acquired” adobe programmes which I will be learning to use in depth and become a multimedia whore, except instead of doing the cooch for a bitta silver on the corner, I’ll be doing an animation of me doing the cooch…. Actually that’s not the best example of what I’m trying to say here. The point I’m making is I plan to become good enough so I can build a massive portfolio of all things Seán, which if you’ve been following any of my stuff is a whole lot of crazy shit.

Anyways, I think my first thing in the tube to be fired out this week is a video blog so I must hop and skip to it! I think I’ll talk about my mild obsession with the horror genre for this one so expect the bizarre (although, I’m sure it’s to be expected already).

If anyone has any suggestions on things I could talk about in the future, fire ‘em out bellow or not, until next time, TOODLES!!

Welcome to Silent Hill

"If you ever see this sign run very far in the opposite direction"

I suppose it was only a matter of time before a few of you who know me have come to expect me to write a post about a little game called Silent Hill. And for those of you who don't know me, if you did know me, you would've come to expect me to write a post about Silent Hill. Now, I will write a post about Silent Hill.

I love Silent Hill because personally to me, it is quite possibly the most terrifying experience in the multimedia medium. I love the horror genre and have a bit of an obsession with them (a h-obsession?! har har har!) but this game surpasses every good horror film and gets not just under your skin but also in your head, assuming you have one, which would be quite disturbing if you didn't because then you'd anatomically incorrect. Anyways, I honestly have only played through the first game in the series on the PS1 and I have played half way through 2 and 3. But unfortunately due to compatibility issues with the 2nd and 3rd one on my laptop (yes, my laptop strikes it's whiny bitch hammer onto me yet again) I never got to finish 2 or 3. But fortunately, I'm quite impatient and have the mouth burns to prove it, so I went ahead and spoiled the rest of 2 and 3 for myself with wikipedia. I'm also only going to refer to the first 3 games as they're essentially the main trilogy that are considered the strongest in the series (there is also a prequel, a 4th and a 5th).

Basically, all of the Silent Hill games revolve around a town called (you guessed it!) Silent Hill. This town has a malicious history but in the modern era has become a tourist resort town. In each game you play as a protagonist that is some how linked to the town and winds up being caught in its hellish grasp and can only leave or escape when they have revelations about their past uncovered. You see, Silent Hill is a little different from most towns, it's caught in a certain situation, and not a Mike "The Situation" sort of situation, but something a little more terrifying (just a little!).

"Yo I'm Mike "The Situation" and don' go to Silent Hill or you'll be caught in a Situation! 

Situation, situation, situ....zzzzzz"

It seems to have somehow got itself caught between here and Hell, referred to as "Otherwold" in the games. Silent Hill has itself based in 3 dimensions. The normal dimension, which is just the normal town, the 2nd dimension which is essentially when you're caught (and also screwed to say the least...) in a fog shrouded town where demons roam the street and exits from the town fall into infinite voids, and then there's the final dimension. The final dimension is the Otherworld, a hellish twisted, rotting industrialised version of the town, pitch black and filled with stuff of nightmares. And trust me when I say stuff of nightmares, they really really are. The creatures in the game are usually representation's or metaphors of some part of the protagonist's psyche or other characters' psyches in the game and as you learn more about your in game avatar the more disturbing each revelation and monster gets. The most terrifying of these creatures usually reside in "Otherworld" and sometimes bleed into the foggy second dimension of Silent hill. I can already imagine what my terrifying creature would look like:

"Noooooo not the Custard Creams!!!!"

What makes these creatures terrifying is also their appearance. You can feel the repressed violent urges of some, the dramatic pain of others and suppressed sexual connotations of several. Usually appearing as some sort of wet sheen coated, curvy (and sometimes bobacious) twitchy and rotting entity, they twitch, crawl and run towards you in a terrifying manner. Their disgustingly sexual appearances subconsciously affect us as they take most intimate human actions and twist them into a horrifying form.

I'm trying to think of the best way to describe them but it's very tough and this quite possibly is the most honest post I have ever written about something. I remember when playing through the first one I could only handle it in small doses, probably 30 mins is the most I spent playing it on my first go through. It had me on the very edge, so much so that I had to turn my phone onto silent just so it wouldn't give me a fright. But alas that plan failed miserably as the vibration of my phone on the desk as I played nearly gave me a heart attack, and subsequently I didn't play any more that day. That would've been an embarrassing funeral story!

"Engraved on my Hello Kitty Tombstone: He played, He put his phone on silent, he got a phone call and died"

However there is one of the creatures in the game that has become iconic with the series (amongst others, such as the nurses) and he appears in the second game. He goes by the name of Pyramid Head and yes, it quite literally means he has a pyramid on his head. Welded to his head in fact, he can't remove it and it constantly inflicts intense pain on him. He kind of becomes instantly burnt into the VERY FABRIC OF OUR BEING with his first appearance. For lack of better words I shall show you instead.

Yup, the first time you come across this pointy headed nightmare (apart from one brief appearance beforehand) he's having smoosh smoosh more intensely than Snooki with two other creatures. If that doesn't make sense to you, he's raping two other creatures. This is a little "unsettling" to watch one might say but sets the dread dead into stone for each encounter you have with him throughout the game. And encounters you have, from being locked into a confined space with him while he tries to give you a little nick with his blade (the size of me) to being chased down a corridor where he slaughters the only other person you find in the town like Uwe Bowl does to every film he directs. He's just a nasty piece of work and the only thing scarier than him is being caught in an infinite time loop watching the same 2 episodes of Friends (or just "flicking on E4" as I like to call it). He's the series reminder of how creative (and wonderfully twisted) the creators of the series are and how the simple concept of putting something, such as a pyramid on someone's head can produce a jarring and unsettling appearance. Each game has it's own story and unique set of monsters but they are all linked in a way to each other and they always result in a journey to/through Silent Hill.

Anyways I really wish I could go on about these games for ages and ages but I feel like this post is already too long as it is (I know I probably would have given up halfway through this if I didn't write it) so I leave you with a recommendation of playing these games if you can get your smelly hands on them. Thanks for the read if you made it this far and hopefully you won't have the same nightmares I did about these games!

Intense Walking - The Consumer Cycle

I realised today that I can be a really intense walker when walking alone. Moving through the throngs of consumers (there are no "people" during Christmas, only the soulless creatures that crawl out of Hells hairy arse, the Consumers) on shop street in Galway today, I couldn't help but notice my intense walking affecting the lives of others around me. This intense walking is possibly the result of a mixture of things: I'm usually quite cold so I walk fast to make myself warm, I'm quite spaced out during these moments so I contain a certain soulessness to my facial expression and finally, I usually listen to music from the Silent Hill games. For those of you that don't know, Silent Hill is a videogame revolving around a town caught in a hell that depicts an industrial pseudo-sexual nightmare. Just think of the hottest girl or guy you know, castrate them, melt off their face and remove their clothes while some how nailing a rusty railway spike (or several) through some limb or appendage while they rot and you've got something that closely resembles the game. And then imagine how the music sounds to this picture.

"Your other half from Silent Hill, say hello to Betsy... or is it Alan?"

The walking which results creates a sort of hellish, depressing, unstoppable force of me hobbling towards you with a impenetrable sense of ungodliness. Reactions have been various, but I have always had consumers move with a polite "excuse me" and a smile which feels normal to me, but by the expression of Stranger A (and B,C,D,etc.), would make me imagine I have just shat on their face. They look unsettled, which at first used to kind of worry me, but now it's as normal to me as custard cream in a biscuit. However there are moments when it does get a bit awkward and it's usually when I walk behind two consumers (usually women) that are chatting away to each other and I am unable to pass them. They usually become aware of my unintentionally malevolent presence behind them as I speed up and fall behind, speed up and fall behind like some sort of demon yo-yo, because I keep thinking I have opportunities to pass them. Every time they turn around and look at me it probably appears something like this:

Their uneasiness excretes from their pores like sweat from that fat guy at the gym, and I become disdainfully aware as I now have to not only pass them, but do so before their uneasiness infects others around them. This creates a sort of panic between both parties that fuels my demon-train walk to an uncontrollable level. At this point time has become limited edition, I don't have many options so I purposefully subdue an oncoming walker with a glare:

This prompts the oncoming victim to stop dead in their tracks as I glide by the now two silent women. For a brief moment we connect as I pass them by. It feels feral, I am a predatory ostrich at a petting zoo and they are small children, time has stopped for them as they realised they had fed the wroooooong bird. They cower out of the rest of my way and then I pass while they nearly walk into my previous victim. As I walk away I can feel the tension subsiding like a landslide crap in the toilet yet still feel the eyes of the consumer locked onto me like some sort of awkward-inducing ballistic. But soon I am out of site. Rinse and repeat this situation a few times as I walk to HMV.

Then as I walk around the 2 for 1 priced DVD section of HMV I reflect on the several times this has happened and a thought hits me like I'd hit James Blunt if I ever met him. I HAVE BECOME CONSUMER! 

Irony, you son of a bitch.