Father.IO – Real Life FPS

Augmented reality smartphone games could turn out to be a huge wave in gaming. Although all the progress in the world is not worth the possibility of being teabagged by someone with a Windows Phone.

5 Technological Curses of the 21st Century

Technology can be pretty terrible even at the best of times. In a nihilistic existence moving closer to an inevitable end of what could possibly be eternal blackness or failing that a potential afterlife of lasting, unrelenting, tortuous damnation, who needs to be asked if they would like to send an error report?

Life has become a lot more cluttered and distracted since the turn of the century. In the middle of writing that last paragraph I checked facebook for notifications, looked at my Amazon wish list in case anything had dropped in price and wondered the year the Sega Genesis was released but mysteriously wiki-chained all the way to Mark Ruffalo’s filmography. Then I skipped the next 3 songs playing on my phone before searching the lyrics for the song I stopped to rock out to for 3 and a half minutes. That was a lot of time wasted and a lot of life lost, only to find out Farmville is still a thing, that bag has gone up by £3 and The Hulk might have played Sonic The Hedgehog when he was 23. So before I get distracted again here’s a list of things that are spoiling modern day life, starting with…

HD will ruin you and you won’t go back

HD. Allowing the man who wishes to watch naked women with such clarity, he’ll no longer feel obliged to make love to his wife. High Definition viewing is as unnecessary as it is successfully convincing others you have a personality. Deep down we all know this. But regardless, anything less than 720p makes you feel more disgusted than finding a hair on your body that’s not yours. That’s just how we roll. What exactly were all those old family videos filmed on anyway, a microwave?

Our upgrade to HD was sudden and universal, like the number of women who stopped finding Robin Thicke attractive. Once upon a time society was collectively happy with their 50 Hz Toshiba TVs, back when “standard” resolution wasn’t anything to be ashamed of. Then, from the spawn cloud of technological evolution, widescreen TVs came along, waving around their increased fidelity and built in anti-aliasing. Standard TVs hadn’t a clue what a HDMI output was, as they sat there quivering in their scart cables. This gave way to HD-only channels. Now you needed a new TV or a TV that was ‘HD ready’ (which sounds more like a Flight of the Conchords parody than anything else), to be part of it. Suddenly television watching has become like a nightclub, and several TV networks have VIP sections. And up until 2008, you’ve been wearing trainers.

Standard quality was never bad on its own, but compared to High Definition it feels worse than licking an Osbourne soaked in ebola. Without any effort, Billy Big Bollocks HD has made Lil’ Timmy Standard look like the girl at the bar with 2 different shoes on, stealing napkins and sniffing other bar-goers. Yes, we can see picture more clearly now than Johnny Nash, but at what cost?

5 Technological Miracles of the 21st Century

Gather around children and let me tell tales of a time long ago. Tales of a magical era when you were never more than 30 minutes away from having a pizza delivered to you regardless of state of mind or location. You could command birds of an unexplained exasperated disposition to hurtle themselves into livestock-inhabited construction sites. A time when the most trusted encyclopaedia ever, was written by people no more intelligent than you or I. It was a time of miracles, it was the dawn of the 21^st century.

There are a lot of ways in which the present day is the hardest time to be alive in history. On the other hand – Siri. 20 years ago, if you heard the word “Siri”, you’d think there was a South African apologizing somewhere. Sure an increasing population and the demands of urbanisation are outweighing the natural resources we have to sustain them, plus we’ve been in this global recession for around 3000 years now but we also live in a world where the Nintendo Wii exists. It can’t be all bad.

So even though people enjoy complaining about the age we live in, “people are getting stupider”, “there are too many distractions in society”, “there’s not enough bacon in my baconator”, etc. here’s a list of awesome things that the (1^st) world enjoy relentlessly, starting with…

HD is beautiful and you won’t go back

HD. Allowing a man to view naked women with such clarity, he’ll no longer need to make love to his wife. The pleasure of watching anything in high definition is akin to having your significant other enact your favourite fantasy. It’s unbelievable at first, and even after you melt into it you never want it to end (not to mention you can’t believe you’re doing it in the middle of the day). If you a fan of comfortable viewing experiences the 21^st century is a pretty sweet time to be around; between television, online videos, movies and video games, the fidelity of detail is astounding. And computers mouses come without wires now. How amazing is that?

The level of video quality it is currently possible to render is so great, the average computer monitor can’t even truly display it all (pull your finger out Phillips). Technology is at a level so photographically advanced, reality looks dim by comparison. God rest her soul but every time you turn on Fashion Police you could tell if Joan Rivers was wearing underwear or not. If that doesn’t scream ‘I live in the 21^st century’, I don’t know what does.

And HD quality doesn’t just make the present exciting but the future as well. Even though perhaps unthinkable, video quality will only continue to improve. With terms like “High Frame Rate”, “16:9 Aspect Ratio” and “Directed by James Cameron” flying around, you could easily think technology has improved tenfold every time you check out Digital Spy. Jargon understood only by Christopher Nolan and 5 & a half other people roughly translates to “really freakin’ good video”, and that’s all we need to know. Words like Blu-Ray, 60fps, IMAX, 1080p and 4K are more likely members of the world’s first all cyborg boyband anyway.