Chris Worfolk's Blog

Ally Fogg recently published a very good article in The Guardian regarding Alan Turing. It said basically the same thing I wrote back in July. Sure, his writing is more poetic and his spelling may be correct. But… I don’t really have an end to this sentence.

I haven’t written anything in a few days as I didn’t see the point when I had nothing to say. Things are going well though. I beat the third boss on Scale Warriors. Not sure how. Mainly just luck I think lol.

Today I did All I Want To Do on score attack (easy) and completed it! That was cool. Of course there are four or five difficulty settings before you have master the song but it is still cool to know I’m making some progress. I tried it a few days ago and totally failed it.

Some negatives too. The guitar tuner crashed on me and nothing would respond. I couldn’t see a reset button the PS3, so in the end I just used the eject button and that exited back to the PS3 start page. Then the controller started responding again and I was able to reload the page.

I’ve now played every song but one. That one is locked and it says go to Uplay to unlock it. However, when I went into there it isn’t clear how I unlock it. I probably just need to play around with it some more.

Also the pricing for extra songs isn’t cheap. I went into the shop today and individual songs are £2.39. You can also get song packs which vary in price. For example Alice in Chains which contains 5 songs is £9.69. The Green Day song pack contains three songs and is priced at £6.49. Those seem to be the two price points for the amount of songs you get.

At the start of 2013, which as usual begin with a January I was busy eating as I put together my book while taking some doctor-ordered time off killing things. We found time for a New Year’s Eve part of course. I attended my first Bettakultcha and we held the first Worfolk Limited Christmas party. Gijsbert moved to Glasgow and I became Vice President of Education at White Rose Speakers.

In February a failure of referees to call what was clearly pass interference cost the 49ers the Super Bowl while Bill Gates delivered an excellent Dimbleby Lecture. We celebrated Darwin Day, Galileo Day and Copernicus Day. I got my area trophy for humorous speaking and Hiltler’s other pope resigned.

I took Elina to the Dales for her birthday in March. There were ponies. Also steak. Michelle paid a visit and I competed in the International Speech Contest for the first time. Trinity opened and found out that really needed a proper roof. I read The Grapes of Wrath – not that I don’t often read, but it is such an amazing book. Sarann and Moz becamse the first A-Soc couple to get married and the Foundation published its report on on how much you can earn begging. The answer is, not much.

There was much sorrow and joy depending on your position in April when Margaret Thatcher passed away. Meanwhile I was busy campaigning for the return of Thai curry steak Yorkshires. The NFL held its 2013 draft and I started reading Discworld. I won the area contest in the International speech contest with “The Easy; and the Worthwhile” that I videoed at White Rose Speakers. I placed third at the division level.

In May Leeds Skeptics set a new record attendance with Dr Brooke Magnanti who also spoke at QED while she was down here. James ran the Leeds Half Marathon and we went to Chester Zoo. I attended the Riviera Renaissance conference in Torquay, at which there was another zoo. I donated my thousandth dollar on Kiva, we partied for Eurovision and I spoke out against the tyranny of clothing.

I was elected president of Leeds City Toastmasters in June while Bob stepped down after 34 years serving as secretary for the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire. The BHA brought its annual conference to Leeds and we had a magic show at Leeds Skeptics.

It was a busy summer in July with trips to Flamborough (from which I posted lots of photos), Finland (again, lots of photos) and relatives visiting from Canada. John Sweeney spoke at Leeds Skeptics, we celebrated Higgs Day and CWF announced Anxiety Leeds. Perhaps a bigger achivement than all of that was that I finished Ulysses.

Yorkshire Day kicked off August and in honour I made some Yorkshire puddings. We visited Yorkshire Wildlife Park and Alan Partridge returned, this time to the big screen. We also held Toastmasters in the Park and visited Hull. The biggest achievement of the month however was without a doubt the founding of Worfolk Media and launch of the Leeds Restaurant Guide.

In September I was a little saddened to see John Oliver’s spot guest-hosting the Daily Show come to an end. We visited Michelle in Jersey and Anxiety Leeds held their first meeting after some great build-up publicity including interviews on Radio Aire and BBC Radio Leeds.

It was a month of travelling in October with PNPNW13, the North West Humanist Conference and going down to London to see the NFL at Wemberly. Toastmasters held an event for Leeds Business Week and I won the area speech contest and for the first time ever, the division level one as well. Leeds Skeptics set another new attendance record when Simon Singh came up to give a talk and we launched Sunday Assembly Leeds.

Pretty much nothing happened in November. Or maybe so much happened that I didn’t have time to blog about it. Probably the latter given we moved house. I travelled down to Colchester to compete in the UK & Ireland speech contest finals and visited Temple Works which a isn’t particularly significant event but it is an amazing building. I paid my first visit to Leeds Arena to see Nickelback and we attended our second year of Finnish Christmas carols. Meanwhile Sunday Assembly Leeds held an event that was actually on a Sunday.

Finally in December the comedian Kate Smurfwaite delivered her show at Leeds Skeptics, I walked out of my first ever gig at an incredibly disappointing Tenacious D concert. Nelson Mandela passed away and we all spent a few days scoring points off each other – it is what he would have wanted. There was some kind of holiday season and the Humanist Action Group’s annual Holiday Food Drive for local homeless shelters raised over three thousand pounds worth of donations.

Eminem has courted no lack of controversy over the years. A lot of his songs are about murdering women and doing drugs, two topics which young people seem to identity with to a worrying large extent.

The problem is, it is hard to deny Eminem produces really great music though. He has received almost universal praise from critics and the public alike. He has remained consistently at the top of the charts for the past fifteen years and was the biggest selling artist of last decade. Even The Guardian likes his music.

I haven’t listened to him much since he released The Marshall Mathers LP, but with the release of The Marshall Mathers LP 2 I decided to give it a listen. It’s good. Really good. Enough to overcome the fact that I am not really a fan of hip hop music and make me listen to it.

His lyrics have matured, no surprise given he will turn 42 this year. The subjects haven’t changed too much, and the style remains the same. The lyrics still come thick and fast and delivered with perfection. But the album feels far more reflective than his earlier albums.

Feeling a bit more positive today. I’m still unable to set a new high score in guitarade. I can’t even set a score on scale warriors because I can’t get passed the first boss. I think I’m getting closer though. Every now and then, I’m actually hitting the right note for the scales. Just need to keep making progress on it.

Came back to it this afternoon and finally managed to get past the first boss on scale warriors! I had quite a few sneaky looks at the strings but it’s a start. I also managed to beat the second boss and get all the way to level 3. Then lost spectacularly.

Watch this ExxonMobil advert:

It’s promoting petrol. It’s like that parody when The Simpsons go to Epcot. But it’s happening in real life!

I don’t feel like I’ve made much progress today. I played some ducks redux, which is the game where you move up and down the fretboard and once again failed to get anywhere near my high score. This is despite levelling up twice.

I did get better on some of the songs though. I played Sweet Mountain River and got 87% accuracy followed by a 92% accuracy. That is from looking down at the fretboard and strings though. That being said, at least I know what extra to look at now, whereas when I started I couldn’t even do that, so maybe I am making some very slow progress.

I’ve been pretty much playing the guitarcade games all the time because it doesn’t seem to be able to move on with anything until I have mastered getting the right fret and string. However I think it probably is important to keep going back and playing songs as it might be you don’t really see any progress on the games but when you go back and do a song it is more noticeable.

I’ve changed the pick-ups on my guitar and am now getting much better results on String Skip Saloon. I had it set to the lowest setting, bottom pick-up only, but I strum near the top one, so I changed the switch to use the top and middle one.

A lot of guitars will have three pick-ups and five switch positions – these translate to top only, top and middle, middle only, bottom and middle, bottom only.

I’m still finding the amount of time it takes to reload the game frustrating though. I’m just not very good at it and so often lose very quickly. Then it takes ages to get back to the game. Here is a video showing what I mean.

Of course it would help if I wasn’t terrible at the game. But we have to deal with the reality of the situation.

I started playing the power chords game last night though and that is a lot better. It gets you to play a chord, then you have to use it to shoot zombies. Add more chords are added you have to switch between them to shoot at the zombies before they kill you. If you die, you can just continue. This affects you score, but I’m more interested in learning than getting on the scoreboard.

I’m still unable to set a new top score on string skip saloon. I set 4,697,000 ages ago and haven’t been able to get anywhere near it since, even though I set that at a fairly low level and now I’m on level 10, so all my scores have a x10 multiplier on them. I’m having to fight the voice in my head that is saying “you’ll never master this”.

I started playing scale warriors today as well. This seems quite a good game as you have to move around the fret and strings at the same time. I have encountered a weird bug where one of the enemies walks off the screen and then walks on a few minutes later though.

I did a couple of extra hours yesterday evening while my enthusiasm is still high. I can’t decide how much extra time to put in or not. On one hand I should get the practice in while I still want to. But on the other maybe it will be less frustrating and I’ll get fed up less quickly if I just stick to the one hour per day.

I spent quite a lot of time on the “guitarcade” stuff, which are arcade games that teach you basic skills like getting the right string and navigating the fretboard. These are brilliant for making repetitive learning fun but you can end up losing on them quite fast and then you have to go through two stats screens, the start screen and the little intro animation before you get back to the game. It feels like I spend more time waiting for the game to restart than I do playing it a lot of the time.

I’m also struggling with some of the basics even though I’m doing okay on the harder stuff. For example I’ve completed the chords lesson to 100% but I’m finding it really hard to hold the pick without gripping it and I really have to focus to do alternative picking (where you go up and down). Maybe this will be easier when I actually know which string is which without looking.

Today I had some problems with the String Skip Saloon game. It isn’t registering a lot of my low-E strums. I thought it might be my guitar at first , especially as it fell apart today. However I had soon had that fixed with my trusty screwdriver and yet the problem continued. This meant I kept losing games because I was strumming E to shoot the bandits but they weren’t being shot.

Sometimes it would just buffer a little and then you would strum again before it caught up with you – sending two shots, one bouncing off the wall and moving all the other bandits forward. Other times it just wouldn’t register no matter how many times I tried and the bandits got to the bar. I had to give up playing the game in the end because it just wasn’t working at all. I tried calibrating my guitar but no solution there either. I might need to fiddle with my pickups as noted on their official forums.

I’ve started playing the ninja slide game too, but I don’t think I will get very far on that until I have mastered navigating the fretboard. I set a new high score on ducks redux though, so hopefully that point isn’t too far away.

What do you do when your Business Analyst spends all his time working from home? Individually wrap everything on his desk and put it under the office Christmas tree of course.