Logical dreamscape: the TV reboot

I woke up the other morning and felt genuinely sad that the dream I’d just had wasn’t real.

It was about a TV show, you see. I think in my head somewhere was the memory of my recent discovery that The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air is now being remade as a serious Netflix-style drama called Bel-Air, now in its second series of ten glossy hour-long episodes with spectacular production values, grappling with issues of racial tension and culture shock. Well, my brain said, if you can make a big-budget serial drama out of the Fresh Prince, you can do anything.

Four Word Reviews: Joy

Do you know what it isn’t any more? It isn’t April. And that’s a shame, because April is traditionally the month in which we Four Word Review the heck out of a Christmas album (see Mahalia, Barbra Streisand, Michael Bublé), and right now I’ve got another Christmas album burning a hole in my CD collection. So let’s throw tradition to the wind and have a listen to Joy: A Holiday Collection by Jewel, even though it’s May and May is nowhere near as inherently Christmassy as April.

Southseeing not Southdoing

It didn’t even have a title until I sat down to scan it in, and now here it is: the book recording possibly our most chaotic and disrupted silly weekend away together, the time that you were both supposed to see my new house and instead we all went to Portsmouth, except I wasn’t even in Portsmouth for some of the time.

Still, this one is an absolute joy to peruse. Among many other things, you can delight yourself with:

Wabs McKenzie in the “snuggle hole”
Hat-a-boat
How boats really work
Tad Kensington and his “unique process”
Ian in da Club (covered in monocles)
Chris sings the Backstreet Boys
Mildren

You can either try to remember it in vivid detail, or you can cheat by visiting our Books page.

Interlude

This month hasn’t been a great month for posting stuff, but luckily I had some stuff in mind so I’m just spamming the Beans with it tonight. The next one is some genuinely good content, but before we get to that, here’s something from a musical project we’ve all been trying to forget.

I still have hours and hours of this that we never even watched, let alone turned into something. Maybe this year I’ll do something with it all.

Your comfortable life

The other week we put our bin out as usual. The black bin, which is recycling, and not the green bin, which is landfill. I would like to meet the person who chose that colour scheme and ask them why they have to take their problems out on the rest of us.

Anyway, we put it out, and when the binpeople had done their thing, we brought it back in. Except now it had a lid that didn’t work properly – it was attached only at one side and flapped around in an unhelpful manner when you tried to open it.

Luckily there’s an easy fix. Amazon will sell you new hinge pins for wheely bins, and for reasons I don’t fully understand it will sell you a pack of eight. Who needs to repair that many wheely bin hinges all at once?

When the new plastic things arrived I opened the pack and fitted one, which resolved the bin problem. I then noticed the label on the packet.

“QOPAHI”, it said, this being the sort of mindless collection of letters that makes up every brand name on Amazon these days. “Enjoy your comfortable life”.

Thanks, Qopahi. I will.

Business balloon update

After careful consideration, I have decided that perhaps my first effort of Chris wafting into Europe with his business ideas was not completely on point meaning that a revision was on the cards.

I have therefore gone back and drafted a whole new version to unleash upon those unsuspecting Europeans. Boy, they don’t know what’s about to be shoved up their viso / voltos.

I feel as though I have got the likeness that was lacking in Chris version 1.0 and with the inclusion of a monobrow and a more jovial facial expression I have addressed the criticisms of comments past.

What’s left then is to bask in the joys of my efforts before the balloon can set sail in the morning.

You are such a monkey puncher

What would you think if I told you there was a video game called ‘Monkey Puncher’?

Would you think it was a simple game about twatting a monkey in the face over and over again? Perhaps it’s one of those free-to-play mobile games that you download, use once for a cheap laugh and then carry on with your life? Look at me now, neither of those options is correct.

‘Monkey Puncher’ is a game developed by Atelier Double and released for the Gameboy Color in the year 2000. I had never heard of this until a few days ago where it briefly appeared and then disappeared on the CEX website, no doubt snapped up by some lightning-fast robot desperate for his next gaming fix. The goal of the game is to train a monkey to fight in organised boxing matches in order to save the main character’s father and sibling. Then it gets stranger.

It sounds like a monster-collecting game but sprinkled with other elements. You train the monkey so he gets better at fighting then you *reads* send it out to the shops? It goes out and buys items for you. Huh. Then what happens?

“Sparring involves a normal match between the player’s monkey and a computer-controlled opponent, although without a clear winner or any reward beyond stat increases. All the monkey’s stats have a maximum limit. It is possible to date your monkeys either with each other or with a monkey from a friend or a dating shop within the game. After dating, the first monkey vanishes and is replaced with a new baby monkey.”

When I first read that paragraph I thought it said that you could date your own monkey which seems like a gross conflict of interest and not something that should be in a kid’s game. That said, none of what I’ve read should probably be in a kid’s game. You force the monkey to beat up other monkeys, you let it loose in the general public, you can whore it out to other monkeys to make better baby monkeys and this is all to save your family? I doubt Big Dave would approve of these methods to save his life.

There doesn’t appear to be a sequel, almost as if the world could not take and was not ready for an experience such as this. In a hundred years time when the alien overlords have taken over the world then possibly monkey punching will be a real thing. Given how prone the internet is to fads and everything extreme and extremist perhaps we may not have to wait so long before Twitch is chocked full of streams of trained monkeys beating up celebrities to raise money for charity. If I can make a prediction for the future within the next ten years, I would put money on that.

Beans flashback: Chris gives blood

Can you believe that one of the defining moments of my life, and probably of yours too, was ten years ago today? The New Beans didn’t exist back then, so I didn’t record this for posterity as a blog post. The ten year anniversary seems like a good time to put that right.