Seph Bentos

Why? Just, why?

So I heard One Direction for the first time the other day and it severely depressed me.

I mean really, not even ‘Oh my God that’s so depressing’, I’m talking actually got me down due to it’s bland soulless…ness. So I channel hopped, only to be greeted with JLS, Bieber and then The Jonas Brothers.

When I tweeted about not enjoying OD, I was met with the fury of a number of angry ‘One Directioners’(?) who told me to ‘get my ears checked because they are the most popular band in the world at the moment’ and that I was pathetic (in these messages ‘your’ was constantly used in place of ‘You’re’). I thought of various comebacks, but then decided not to reply as they were probably 10 and that would bullying.

Within the same few minutes, I was made aware that Heat magazine are launching a ‘music channel’ based around ‘Celeb Goss’.

Everything I do this week will be mega positive and great to stop me from going postal. Music TV is dead.

Out of ideas? Just steal from actual creative people on the internet, everyone else does.

I was out in Liverpool the other day and to my dismay I noticed this. Seriously, it’s so shameless these days how companies just blatantly steal popular ideas from the internet and use them to make a quick buck.

Whenever I see companies doing this, I instantly lose all respect for their brand and stop buying their products. Virgin can go suck a lemon since I witnessed this:

Other guilty parties include Nivea for men and Sacla (Or whatever it’s called) who have both stolen Lasse Gjertsen’s concepts to sell their products. Since witnessing their shameless display of thievery I have made a point of not buying any of their products.

Fuck them with a ten foot pole, I hope whoever stole the ideas and readily took the money died in a slow and painful way with their last thoughts being how no one will mourn their passing.

Voluntarily Unsocial: Online Gaming

Having been born in the latter years of the 1980s, I belong to that strange generation who remember things from the early 1990s but are not young enough to be classed as noughties kids. There isn’t really a recognised title for us ‘Post-Generation-X/Pre-9-11’ people, despite the fact that we possess a number of distinguishing characteristics.

It’s a decent generation to be from, at least with regards to video games. We were there when a lot of the classics started out such as Sonic the Hedgehog and Resident Evil, but what sets us apart from our bigger brothers and sisters is the fact that we literally grew up right alongside a number of these games.

We’re like slightly younger ‘Clerks’ characters but DVDs are still new to us.

Before I continue, I must highlight that I’m not trying to brag here by any means. It takes no amount of skill or talent to be born at a certain point in time and anyone who says different is clearly a trumped up, unadmirable camel turd. My point is, me and my fellow wannabe Gen-X-ers are the last generation who remember video games before the forever untamable beast known as the internet came along and altered our old friends, making everyone be social and play together like an annoying aunty at a family reunion with the side of the family that you hate because it hates you for no reason.

I’m quite proud of that metaphor, as it works quite well with what I’m talking about. I’m not a huge fan of online gaming myself, but I do appreciate that other people are, just like how I’m not a huge fan of family reunions but I can totally understand why my parents might enjoy seeing how terribly some family members who they resent are doing. I enjoy my family the way it is and I don’t need other people waltzing in and tainting it for me by reminding me that by being part of it, I am associated with this dick wrench over here.

 
Pictured: Online Gaming

Basically, by playing a game online, you get grouped together with people who are in to the same things as you. To me, this is the equivalent to me being a kid again and being left with some distant, intollerable relative simply because they have something very vague in common with me, making it all a bit craptacular.

Just because we both like the Power Ranger movie doesn’t mean I want to spend my time talking about it with this guy, I just want to watch it. In my humble and unimportant opinion, It’s the same with video games.

This is where the positive points of online gaming swing in to play. Having had some bad experiences with online gaming, I’m bound to have a negative view of it, even if I do try to force a smile like a kids clown who has been booked for a 21st party as a piss take.

 
This is as close as I’ll ever get to enjoying Online Gaming.

The situation I described before wouldn’t be so bad if I was with my friends. I like them and according to what the guy who talked me down from that roof said, they like me too. That and I can trust them not to ramble complete bollocks left right and centre while I’m trying to enjoy the Power Rangers film/a game that I like.

Yes, if I don’t like playing with strangers I can always just play online with my friends. This is true and I’m not denying it. It even fits in perfectly with my whole solitary gamer thing left over from my formative and internetless gaming years. We can play in to the early hours of the morning without the knowledge hanging over our heads that we have to get home at some point or else we’ll be sleeping on the floor being a potential prank target.

Another thing I can trust of them is that no matter how badly a game goes, it’s all in good fun. While I take games seriously to a certain point, I have met some people online whose lives are so empty, that the idea of a loss on a video game is their equivalent to being castrated in public on their birthday.

 
Looks like someone just got bested on the latest online FPS

With the Xbox Live Rep system, you can give other players good or bad ratings depending on their behaviour during an online game, although most people just use it to give all of their friends five star player ratings, causing the validity of the entire system to burn away quicker than a tissue doused in petrol.

Being a fan of the Tekken series, I decided to treat myself with a copy of Tekken 6, which like most games released today has an online option. I decided that this might actually be fun given that I rate myself fairly high on the Tekken front. It’s a game which I have excelled at since the mid 90s, a highlight of which being when I came 3rd out of 50 in an open tournament put on to promote the release of ‘Tekken Tag Tournament’.

Unfortunatley, as soon as I started playing online with other real users the fact that I had trained myself up on Very Hard mode for years was irrellevant. These real players didn’t play like the Very Hard CPU adversaries at all. They all used the same two or three characters and with each used one cheap, nigh on unblockable attack repeatedly.

 
…Who else? I don’t think 90% of online Tekken players would notice if you removed all but these two characters from the character selection screen.

This was fine, I know people who would utilise those tactics too. But these online ‘players’, once sussed, were incredibly easy to beat. The players who repeated the cheap attacks could be easily manipulated and once they realised you had them by the balls, they would either disconnect causing my game to freeze or file a complaint against me for things like ‘Racist Language’ or ‘Unfriendly, Overly Violent Playing’, causing my gamertag rep to dip.

‘This isn’t fun’ I thought to myself, bravely carrying on. ‘If my friends were here playing it with me we could at least have a laugh about what was happening.’

But they weren’t there, not in person anyway. The only people I had to enjoy one of my favourite titles with were people with no respect for it who took losing very badly and told Bill Gates and all of his mates that I was a violent racist, the exact sort of behaviour I’d expect from some distant prick of a relative I’d been saddled with at my theoretical family reunion. They’re the sort that would tell the other family members that I hit them if I didn’t give them my sweets and they’re the sort of whingy little bell ends I can do with out.

 
But if I gave you this sweet watch, what would I fire at you with my teeth?

Other online aspects like the constant dick swinging puts me off too. People who comment on a low gamerscore are probably either trying to make themselves feel better after seeing that someone has a much higher one than them despite their devotion, or they don’t realise that if gamerscore was counted for all games dating back to the Amiga, us low gamerscore players would probably have at minimum, an 18 digit score. People like me, we play games to enjoy them, not to out do each other, and dick swinging to the point of obssessive playing is the exact mentality that online gaming promotes and lives off.

I guess that my conclusion is that online gaming may be good fun for you and your friends, but any online player who you don’t know is more than likely a complete biscuit dick, but the knowledge that ‘people are twats’ isn’t news, it’s just one of life’s facts.

-Seph Bentos

Invasion of the Relentless Spambots.

What is it with Spambots and social networking sites? Not a day goes by without one of these Spambots following me on Twitter or what-have-you. We’re never going to click on any miscellaneous links they send us and they may as well use the images I threw together to create that title image as their profile pictures. We all know that it’s spam the second we see it, so why the hell do they persist?

The worst thing is, I’m instantly suspicious of any female who follows any of my online accounts be it Tumblr, Twitter etc until they do something that proves their humanity and it shouldn’t be like that. How bad would you feel if a genuine pretty human girl were to take a genuine interest in what you had to say online only for you to report the poor lass as spam and block her?

He clicked the link.

The worst is on Tumblr when I post something I feel particularly proud of and it gets notes from obvious Spambot accounts. It’s almost as if a Spambot is taking pity on me for the lack of notes on my post has and decides to like it to make me feel better in an attempt to win me over and convince me of their humanity before assimilating me like something from Star Trek.

NO I don’t want free hand jobs or penis enlargement ointment.

…Not from YOU anyway, you faux hominid.

The undignified and slow death of music television.

I just saw an advert on a music channel taking the piss out of people who use the internet to watch music videos or just listen to music in general.

Honestly.

It showed a POV shot of a guy at a laptop clicking through shit videos (They even referenced Rick Rolling) then said ‘Don’t waste your time with THIS! Get on to our channel for the BEST in the latest SMASH HITS blah blah.’

Seriously, as if music TV wasn’t fighting enough of a losing battle, they genuinely insult their core audience and try to belittle the internet in favour of out dated, random music television that only shows auto tuned corporate shit.

Some of the best artists I’ve discovered have been online and they aren’t restricted to ‘safe’ marketable standards. They are passionate and honest and probably deserve my money more than some faceless record label giants.

JUST LET IT DIE ALREADY.

Life without Tumblr

I know the thought is insane, but recently I (for whatever reason) didn’t log on Tumblr for about a month. I can confirm that Tumblr is similar to Heroine, as once you get in to it, doing anything else instantly becomes utter crap.

Facebook has been mostly full of people either making indirect, passive aggressive jabs at each other, posting funny things (which I had seen on Tumblr months ago) or just generally moaning. I do like Facebook as I can stay in touch with friends and such. It’s just Tumblr is so superior it isn’t even funny.

‘Why have all of my friends become unborn babies?‘ 

The fact that Facebook seems to be actively trying to become Tumblr says a lot. The way your status update can be things other than text, such as photos and such. The way any photos which are uploaded appear in the feed like Tumblr images. It’s just shameless.

Facebook: ‘Yesterday’s News, Today!’

For roughly a month, I have felt less enthused in general and seem to have contracted the general sense of ‘being miserable about anything’ which covers the majority of Facebook posts.

Upon returning to Tumblr I instantly felt uplifted; I was laughing out loud at the humorous and clever posts which constantly appear on my dashboard (Probably because they were relevant to things I give two shits about) and I was left wanting more when I reached the end of the new posts which had been created since my last check in.

Bottom line? Tumblr > Facebook.

The Unfortunate Truth IV

It is a given that there are always going to be people who have differing opinions to our own, with neither party being correct. That’s what opinion is.

However.

This suggests that it is statistically likely that there are legions of people with not only a different opinion but the EXACT OPPOSITE opinion on EVERYTHING to you. Don’t be surprised if you one day come across some online user who despises Harry Potter and loves crocs with equal amounts of passion.

Above: Your polar opposite (Unless you’re a weirdo who doesn’t like Harry Potter and loves rubbish shoes).

Just something I made…